Comparison of two point-of-care respiratory panels for the detection of influenza A/B virus

Abstract

Background

Rapid and accurate diagnostics of patients with suspected seasonal influenza or pathogens of the upper respiratory tract is crucial. Fast detection is important especially for influenza A/B virus, so that isolation measures should be taken to prevent the spread of the virus.

Methods

We compared the performance of two syndromic testing methodologies (QIAstat-Dx RP, BioFire RP2plus) against the Alere™ i as the comparator method. Totally, 97 swab samples were included from patients with symptoms of acute respiratory infection admitted in the hospitals of the wider region of Crete, Greece.

Results

The Positive Percent Agreement (PPA) of the BioFire RP2plus was 100% (95% CI 87.66%-100%), while the Negative Percent Agreement (NPA) was estimated at 91.3% (95% CI 82.03%–96.74%). This method produced no invalid results. For QIAstat-Dx RP the PPA was 89.29% (95% CI 71.77%-97.73%), while the NPA was 91.3% (95% CI 82.03%-96.74%, 63/69). The BioFire RP2plus managed to determine the subtype in more samples than the QIAstat-Dx RP.

Conclusions

Both panels can be valuable tools for clinicians, since they both display high sensitivity and specificity. We report a slightly better performance for BioFire RP2plus, since it produced no invalid results.

Keywords:

• Alere™ i
• QIAstat-Dx RP
• BioFire RP2plus
• syndromic testing
• influenza

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).