Development of a Smartphone-based reading system for lateral flow immunoassay

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Analytical Chemistry
• Point-of-Care Diagnostics

Background:

• Lateral flow immunoassay (LFIA) is a common diagnostic technique.
• Existing benchtop readers can be expensive and not easily portable.
• There is a need for accessible and accurate diagnostic tools.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and evaluate a smartphone-based reading system for LFIA.
• To assess the performance of the developed system compared to a benchtop reader.
• To determine the system's suitability for point-of-care medical diagnostics.

Main Methods:

• A smartphone application was developed on the Android platform for image acquisition and data analysis.
• A portable LFIA reader was constructed using a smartphone, close-up lens, and LED light.
• Standard curves were generated, and performance metrics like mean, standard deviation, recovery, and relative standard deviation (RSD) were calculated.
• Limit of detection (LOD) was determined for both systems.

Main Results:

• The smartphone-based system demonstrated high accuracy and good reproducibility with RSD < 10% for Salmonella concentrations from 10^6 to 10^9 CFU/mL.
• The limit of detection (LOD) was found to be 10^6 CFU/mL for both the smartphone and benchtop systems.
• The developed system showed comparable performance to the traditional benchtop LFIA reader.

Conclusions:

• The smartphone-based LFIA reading system is a simple, sensitive, and accurate diagnostic tool.
• This system can effectively replace benchtop LFIA readers for point-of-care applications.
• The technology holds promise for improving accessibility in medical diagnostics.