Evaluation of rapid diagnostic tests shows their potential to improve diagnosis in infectious diseases, highlighting their accuracy and clinical utility.
According to the WHO, rapid diagnostic tests are reliable, simple, economical, and easy to interpret. They remain stable even under extreme conditions, require little or no pre-treatment, and require a small volume of biological samples. Their evaluation focuses on the classic characteristics of any biological test: accuracy, reproducibility, diagnostic values, clinical utility, applicability, and cost. These tests offer the advantage of providing rapid results, facilitating early microbiological diagnosis and appropriate patient management. However, their sensitivity is often lower than that of reference methods, which is one of their main limitations.
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Nabil et al. (2025) studied this question.
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