Accuracy of Curable Sexually Transmitted Infections and Genital Mycoplasmas Screening by Multiplex Real-Time PCR Using a Self-Collected Veil among Adult Women in Sub-Saharan Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background . Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are highly prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa. Genital self-sampling may facilitate the screening of STIs in hard-to-reach remote populations far from large health care centers and may increase screening rates. The cross-sectional GYNAUTO-STI study was carried out to assess the performance of a novel genital veil (V-Veil-Up Gyn Collection Device, V-Veil-Up Pharma, Ltd., Nicosia, Cyprus) as a genital self-sampling device to collect genital secretions to diagnose STIs by molecular biology as compared to reference clinician-collected genital specimens, in adult African women. Methods . Adult women living in N’Djamena, the capital city of Chad, were recruited from the community and referred to the clinic for women’s sexual health “ La Renaissance Plus ”. A clinician obtained an endocervical specimen using flocked swab. Genital secretions were also obtained by self-collection using veil. Both clinician- and self-collected specimens were tested for common curable STIs (including Chlamydia trachomatis , Neisseria gonorrhoeae , Mycoplasma genitalium , and Trichomonas vaginalis ) and genital Mycoplasma spp. by multiplex real-time PCR (Allplex™ STI Essential Assay, Seegene, Seoul, South Korea). Test positivities for both collection methods were compared by assessing methods agreement, sensitivity, and specificity. Results . A total of 251 women (mean age, 35.1 years) were prospectively enrolled. Only seven (2.8%) women were found to be infected with at least one common STIs [ C. trachomatis : 3 (1.2%), N. gonorrhoeae : 1 (0.4%), M. genitalium : 4 (1.6%) and T. vaginalis : 1 (0.4%)], while the prevalence of genital mycoplasmas was much higher (54.2%) with a predominance of Ureaplasma parvum (42.6%). Self-collection by veil was non-inferior to clinician-based collection for genital microorganisms DNA molecular testing, with “almost perfect” agreement between both methods, high sensitivity (97.0%; 95%CI: 92.5-99.2%), and specificity (88.0%; 95%CI: 80.7-93.3%). Remarkably, the mean total number of genital microorganisms detected per woman was 1.14-fold higher in self-collected specimens compared to that in clinician-collected specimens. Conclusions . Veil-based self-collection of female genital secretions constitutes a convenient tool to collect in gentle way cervicovaginal secretions for accurate molecular detection of genital bacteria. Such sampling procedure could be easily implemented in STIs clinics in sub-Saharan Africa.
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 | 0.000 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".