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Analytical and diagnostic performance of two automated fecal calprotectin immunoassays for detection of inflammatory bowel disease

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Published/Copyright: January 11, 2017

Abstract

Background:

We evaluated the (pre-)analytical and diagnostic performance of two automated fecal calprotectin (FC) immunoassays, Liaison® Calprotectin (Diasorin) on Liaison® XL and fCAL™ turbo (Bühlmann laboratories AG) on Cobas C501 (Roche Diagnostics), and compared it with our established Bühlmann ELISA method.

Methods:

Our study comprised 229 consecutive patients with clinical suspicion of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).

Results:

All assay related stool extraction procedures showed excellent correlation with the established method, but the new stool extraction devices tend to give higher results as compared with stool weight methods. Both automated assays demonstrated good performance in terms of precision (CVt≤8.1%), accuracy (bias≤6.7%) and total error (≤16.4%). Method comparison with established enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) showed good correlation (rs>0.925), but regression analysis showed significant proportional differences. Diagnostic performance characteristics with regard to diagnosis of IBD were good and in line with other reports. In addition, we were able to show that optimization of manufacturer’s cut-off and moreover, the introduction of a gray zone resulted in a significant increase of post-test probability.

Conclusions:

In conclusion, the newly developed stool extraction device protocols showed acceptable and comparable performance to the stool weight method. Overall, the automated Liaison® Calprotectin and fCAL™ turbo assay showed good analytical and diagnostic performance for detection of IBD.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all clinicians who took part in the study. We thank Diasorin and Alere – Bühlmann Laboratories AG for providing all kits. In addition, we are grateful to the laboratory technicians of General hospital AZ Delta Roeselare Menen for their most valuable efforts. Additionally, we are grateful to Prof. Dr. V. Stove of the Ghent University Hospital for the interesting scientific discussions.

  1. Author contributions: All the authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this submitted manuscript and approved submission.

  2. Research funding: None declared.

  3. Employment or leadership: None declared.

  4. Honorarium: None declared.

  5. Competing interests: The funding organization(s) played no role in the study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; or in the decision to submit the report for publication.

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Received: 2016-9-6
Accepted: 2016-11-22
Published Online: 2017-1-11
Published in Print: 2017-8-28

©2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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