Background:
This study compared and evaluated the performance of a commercially available HIV POC rapid test with assays commonly used in clinical laboratories, including enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), western blot (WB), and reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR).
Methods:
500 patients’ samples were detected by the POC rapid test and clinically common tests (WB, ELISA, and RT-PCR) to compare detection performance, test time, and test cost.
Results:
Taking the WB results as the gold standard, the results of RT-PCR were completely consistent with WB. The concordance of ELISA and POC with WB was 82.00% and 93.80%, respectively, with statistically significant differences (p<0.05).
Conclusion:
This study provides evidence that rapid HIV POC assays are superior to ELISA and that WB and RT-PCR have equal detection performance in detecting HIV. As a result, a rapid and cost-effective HIV definition process based on the POC assays can be proposed.
result:
Taking the WB results as the gold standard, the rate of missed detection by the POC rapid test method was 0, and the compatibility between ELISA and POC was 82.00% and 93.80%, respectively, with statistically significant differences (p&lt;0.05).
conclusion:
This study provides evidence that rapid HIV POC assays are superior to ELISA and that WB and RT-PCR have equal detection performance in detecting HIV. As a result, a new rapid and cost-effective HIV definition process based on the POC rapid assays can be proposed.