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Credit Mehul Dhorda
Recent WWARN research details the multi-centre, observational study conducted to assess the performance of the EasyScan GO at 11 sites worldwide during 2018 and 2019. Sensitivity, specificity, accuracy of species detection and parasite density estimation were assessed with expert microscopy as the reference. Intra- and inter-device reliability of the device was also evaluated by comparing results from repeat reads on the same and two different devices.
The EasyScan GO met the WHO-TDR Research Malaria Microscopy competence Level 2 criteria in parasite detection and species identification accuracy; and Level 4 in terms of parasite quantification and false positive rates. All performance parameters were significantly affected by slide quality. Further software improvement is required to improve sensitivity at low parasitaemia and parasite density estimations.