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

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 (TM) 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.