TY - JOUR
T1 - Point-of-care image-based quantitative urinalysis with commercial reagent strips
T2 - Design and clinical evaluation
AU - Tohl, Damian
AU - Tran Tam Pham, Anh
AU - Li, Jordan
AU - Tang, Youhong
PY - 2024/4
Y1 - 2024/4
N2 - Urinalysis is a useful test as an indicator of health or disease and as such, is a part of routine health screening. Urinalysis can be undertaken in many ways, one of which is reagent strips used in the general evaluation of health and to aid in the diagnosis and monitoring of kidney disease. To be effective, the test must be performed properly, and the results interpreted correctly. However, different light conditions and colour perception can vary between users leading to ambiguous readings. This has led to camera devices being used to capture and generate the estimated biomarker concentrations, but image colour can be affected by variations in illumination and inbuilt image processing. Therefore, a new portable device with embedded image processing techniques is presented in this study to provide quantitative measurements that are invariant to changes in illumination. The device includes a novel calibration process and uses the ratio of RGB values to compensate for variations in illumination across an image and improve the accuracy of quantitative measurements. Results show that the proposed calibration method gives consistent homogeneous illumination across the whole image. Comparisons against other existing methods and clinical results show good performance with a correlation to the clinical values. The proposed device can be used for point-of-care testing to provide reliable results consistent with clinical values.
AB - Urinalysis is a useful test as an indicator of health or disease and as such, is a part of routine health screening. Urinalysis can be undertaken in many ways, one of which is reagent strips used in the general evaluation of health and to aid in the diagnosis and monitoring of kidney disease. To be effective, the test must be performed properly, and the results interpreted correctly. However, different light conditions and colour perception can vary between users leading to ambiguous readings. This has led to camera devices being used to capture and generate the estimated biomarker concentrations, but image colour can be affected by variations in illumination and inbuilt image processing. Therefore, a new portable device with embedded image processing techniques is presented in this study to provide quantitative measurements that are invariant to changes in illumination. The device includes a novel calibration process and uses the ratio of RGB values to compensate for variations in illumination across an image and improve the accuracy of quantitative measurements. Results show that the proposed calibration method gives consistent homogeneous illumination across the whole image. Comparisons against other existing methods and clinical results show good performance with a correlation to the clinical values. The proposed device can be used for point-of-care testing to provide reliable results consistent with clinical values.
KW - Bioelectronics
KW - Image processing
KW - Quantitative analysis
KW - Reagent strip
KW - Urinalysis
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85186440138&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.ymeth.2024.02.002
DO - 10.1016/j.ymeth.2024.02.002
M3 - Article
C2 - 38367653
AN - SCOPUS:85186440138
SN - 1046-2023
VL - 224
SP - 63
EP - 70
JO - Methods
JF - Methods
ER -