Magneto-optical diagnosis of symptomatic malaria in Papua New Guinea

Arndt, L., Koleala, T., Orbán, Á., Ibam, C., Lufele, E., Timinao, L., Lorry, L., Butykai, Á., Kaman, P., Molnár, A.P., Krohns, S., Nate, E., Kucsera, I., Orosz, E., Moore, B., Robinson, L.J., Laman, M., Kézsmárki, I., and Karl, Stephan (2021) Magneto-optical diagnosis of symptomatic malaria in Papua New Guinea. Nature Communications, 12. 969.

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Abstract

Improved methods for malaria diagnosis are urgently needed. Here, we evaluate a novel method named rotating-crystal magneto-optical detection (RMOD) in 956 suspected malaria patients in Papua New Guinea. RMOD tests can be conducted within minutes and at low cost. We systematically evaluate the capability of RMOD to detect infections by directly comparing it with expert light microscopy, rapid diagnostic tests and polymerase chain reaction on capillary blood samples. We show that compared to light microscopy, RMOD exhibits 82% sensitivity and 84% specificity to detect any malaria infection and 87% sensitivity and 88% specificity to detect Plasmodium vivax. This indicates that RMOD could be useful in P.vivax dominated elimination settings. Parasite density correlates well with the quantitative magneto-optical signal. Importantly, residual hemozoin present in malaria-negative patients is also detectable by RMOD, indicating its ability to detect previous infections. This could be exploited to reveal transmission hotspots in low-transmission settings.

Item ID: 67093
Item Type: Article (Research - C1)
ISSN: 2041-1723
Copyright Information: Open Access. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing,adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Funders: National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC), James Cook University (JCU), BME-Nanotechnology and Materials Science
Date Deposited: 24 Jun 2021 02:07
FoR Codes: 42 HEALTH SCIENCES > 4203 Health services and systems > 420319 Primary health care @ 25%
32 BIOMEDICAL AND CLINICAL SCIENCES > 3206 Medical biotechnology > 320602 Medical biotechnology diagnostics (incl. biosensors) @ 50%
42 HEALTH SCIENCES > 4203 Health services and systems > 420310 Health surveillance @ 25%
SEO Codes: 20 HEALTH > 2001 Clinical health > 200101 Diagnosis of human diseases and conditions @ 100%
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