Point-of-Care HIV Test for a Promising Simple and Rapid Clinical HIV Definite Diagnosis Process

Abstract

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.