Evaluation of the Makromed Dipstick Assay versus PCR for Diagnosis of <i>Plasmodium falciparum</i> Malaria in Returned Travelers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Microscopy has been the traditional reference standard for malaria diagnosis. However, difficulty in maintaining the required technical skills, particularly in areas where malaria is not endemic, has prompted the development of rapid nonmicroscopic diagnostic assays based on the detection of malaria parasite antigen in whole blood. In this study, we evaluated the performance of one such device, the Makromed dipstick test, blindly compared to PCR and microscopy for the diagnosis of Plasmodium falciparum malaria in 200 febrile returned travelers. The Makromed assay detects the presence of P. falciparum-specific histidine-rich protein II with an antigen capture immunochromatographic strip format. Compared to PCR as the reference standard, the dipstick assay had a sensitivity of 97.0% and a specificity of 96.0%. The positive and negative predictive values were 81.2% and 99.5%, respectively. Rapid malaria diagnostic devices may provide a useful diagnostic adjunct in a clinical setting.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".