Automation of urine dipstick test by simultaneous scanning : A pilot study

Abstract

Urinalysis is an important clinical test to diagnose urinary diseases, and dipstick method with visual inspection is widely applied in practice. Automated optical devices recently developed have disadvantages of long measurement time, big size and heavy weight, accuracy degradation with time, etc. The present study proposed a new computer scanning technique, in which the test strip and the standard chart were simultaneously scanned to remove any environmental artifacts, followed by automated differentiation with the minimum distance algorithm, leading to significant enhancement of accuracy. Experiments demonstrated an accuracy of 100 % in that all test results were identical with the human visual inspection. The present technique only uses a personal computer with scanner and shortens the test time to a great degree. The results are also stored and accumulated for later use which can be transmitted to remote locations through a network, thus could be easily integrated to any ubiquitous health care systems.