Clinical performance evaluation of a novel, automated chemiluminescent immunoassay, QUANTA Flash CTD Screen Plus

The QUANTA Flash® CTD Screen Plus is a chemiluminescent immunoassay (CIA) for the detection of the major antinuclear antibodies (ANA) on the BIO-FLASH® platform. NOVA View® is an automated fluorescence microscope that acquires digital images of indirect immunofluorescent assay (IFA) slides. Our goal was to evaluate the clinical performance of the two automated systems and compare their performance to that of traditional IFA. Sera from patients with systemic autoimmune rheumatic diseases (SARD, n = 178), along with disease and healthy controls (n = 204), were tested with the CTD CIA and with NOVA Lite® HEp-2 ANA, using both the manual method of reading the IFA slides and the NOVA View instrument. The CTD CIA showed 78.1 % sensitivity for SARD, coupled with 94.1 % specificity. Manual IFA and NOVA View showed somewhat higher sensitivity (81.5 and 84.8 % in SARD, respectively), but significantly lower specificity (79.4 and 64.7 %, respectively). Both automated systems displayed somewhat different performance, due to the different principals of ANA detection: IFA with NOVA View digital image interpretation had higher sensitivity, while the CTD CIA showed higher specificity. With the added benefits of full automation, the new CTD CIA is an attractive alternative to traditional ANA screening.