Clinical Evaluation of In-House-Produced 3D-Printed Nasopharyngeal Swabs for COVID-19 Testing.
Viruses
; 13(9)2021 09 02.
Article
in En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-34578334
ABSTRACT
3D-printed alternatives to standard flocked swabs were rapidly developed to provide a response to the unprecedented and sudden need for an exponentially growing amount of diagnostic tools to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. In light of the anticipated shortage, a hospital-based 3D-printing platform was implemented in our institution for the production of swabs for nasopharyngeal and oropharyngeal sampling based on the freely available, open-source design provided to the community by University of South Florida's Health Radiology and Northwell Health System teams as a replacement for locally used commercial swabs. Validation of our 3D-printed swabs was performed with a head-to-head diagnostic accuracy study of the 3D-printed "Northwell model" with the cobas PCR Media® swab sample kit. We observed an excellent concordance (total agreement 96.8%, Kappa 0.936) in results obtained with the 3D-printed and flocked swabs, indicating that the in-house 3D-printed swab could be used reliably in the context of a shortage of flocked swabs. To our knowledge, this is the first study to report on autonomous hospital-based production and clinical validation of 3D-printed swabs.
Key words
Full text:
1
Collection:
01-internacional
Database:
MEDLINE
Main subject:
COVID-19 Testing
/
SARS-CoV-2
/
COVID-19
Type of study:
Prognostic_studies
Limits:
Humans
Language:
En
Journal:
Viruses
Year:
2021
Document type:
Article
Affiliation country:
Canada
Country of publication:
CH
/
SUIZA
/
SUÍÇA
/
SWITZERLAND