A Rapid Quantitative Determination Method of AFP Concentration with Gold Immunochromatographic Strip

alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) is a useful diagnostic marker for the detection of a great number of infantile diseases, especially for some forms of malignant tumors and liver disorders. Although there are several methods for quantitative determination of AFP, compared with these methods, the gold immunochromatographic assay (GICA)has the advantages of easy to handle, low costs, quick, no requirement for skilled technicians and most important, well suitable for point-of-care measurements. However, GICA mostly has been used for qualitative or semi-quantitative detection visually. This paper presents a rapid quantitative determination method of AFP with GICA strip based on the reflective optical detection. Under the driving of the micro-stepper motor, we can get a curve of GICA strip signal distribution. Then after segmentation of the test line and control line using fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm, the features were extracted to be as the input features of Support Vector Regression (SVR) model. SVR was used for prediction of the AFP concentration. To evaluate the reliability and accuracy of GICA for fast quantitatively determination of AFP and its clinical value, the AFP concentration of specimen was tested by GICA and chemiluminescent immunoassay analyzer, and analyzed the coincident rate and correlation of these two methods. The experiment results demonstrated that the correlation coefficient results between the two methods was 0.961. The test results showed that the SVR model yields a good result and is proved to be appropriate in quantitative determination of AFP with GICA strip.