Automatic Range Adjustment of the Fluorescence Immunochromatographic Assay Based on Image Processing

Abstract

As an emerging technology, fluorescence immunochromatographic assay (FICA) has the advantages of high sensitivity, strong stability and specificity, which is widely used in the fields of medical testing, food safety and environmental monitoring. The FICA reader based on image processing meets the needs of point-of-care testing because of its simple operation, portability and fast detection speed. However, the image gray level of common image sensors limits the detection range of the FICA reader, and high-precision image sensors are expensive, which is not conducive to the popularization of the instrument. In this paper, FICA strips’ image was collected using a common complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor and a range adjustment mechanism was established to automatically adjust the exposure time of the CMOS image sensor to achieve the effect of range expansion. The detection sensitivity showed a onefold increase, and the upper detection limit showed a twofold increase after the proposed method was implemented. In addition, in the experiments of linearity and accuracy, the fitting degree (R2) of the fitted curves both reached 0.999. Therefore, the automatic range adjustment method can obviously improve the detection range of the FICA reader based on image processing.