BACKGROUND The "classical" antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (C-ANCA) pattern seen on indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) is characterised by granular cytoplasmic staining showing central or interlobular accentuation, and is strongly associated with antiproteinase-3 antibodies (PR3-ANCA) and Wegener's granulomatosis. However, many laboratories report C-ANCA in the presence of any cytoplasmic II...

BACKGROUND The "International consensus statement on testing and reporting antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCA)" advocates screening by indirect immunofluorescence (IIF), but external quality assessment programmes often demonstrate different IIF patterns for a single serum. AIM To determine whether the variation in IIF patterns can be attributed solely to errors in interpretation. M...

OBJECTIVE To compare autoantibody features in patients with primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC) and individuals presenting antimitochondria antibodies (AMAs) but no clinical or biochemical evidence of disease. METHODS A total of 212 AMA-positive serum samples were classified into four groups: PBC (definite PBC, n = 93); PBC/autoimmune disease (AID; PBC plus other AID, n = 37); biochemically norma...

Anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCA) are the serological hallmark of small vessel vasculitis, so called ANCA-associated vasculitis. The international consensus requires testing by indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) on human ethanol-fixed neutrophils (ethN) as screening followed by confirmation with enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISAs). This study evaluates the combination of cell...

This study aimed to evaluate the diagnostic utilities of the automated connective tissues disease screening assay, CTD screen, in patients with systemic rheumatic diseases. A total of 1093 serum samples were assayed using CTD screen and indirect immunofluorescent (IIF) methods. Among them, 162 were diagnosed with systemic rheumatic disease, including rheumatoid arthritis (RA), systemic lupus er...

The performance and validation characteristics of different single collector inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometers based on different technical principles (ICP-SFMS, ICP-QMS in reaction and collision modes, and ICP-MS/MS) were evaluated in comparison to the performance of MC ICP-MS for fast and reliable S isotope ratio measurements. The validation included the determination of LOD, BEC,...

Occurrence of autoantibodies (autoAbs) is a hallmark of autoimmune diseases, and the analysis thereof is an essential part in the diagnosis of organ-specific autoimmune and systemic autoimmune rheumatic diseases (SARD), especially connective tissue diseases (CTDs). Due to the appearance of autoAb profiles in SARD patients and the complexity of the corresponding serological diagnosis, different ...

This paper presents new results about the robustness of invariantintegration features (IIF) in noisy conditions. Furthermore, it is shown that a feature-enhancement method known as “powerbias subtraction” for noisy conditions can be combined with the IIF approach to improve its performance in noisy environments while keeping the robustness of the IIFs to mismatching vocaltract length training-t...

INTRODUCTION Analysis of autoantibodies (AAB) by indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) is a basic tool for the serological diagnosis of systemic rheumatic disorders. Automation of autoantibody IIF reading including pattern recognition may improve intra- and inter-laboratory variability and meet the demand for cost-effective assessment of large numbers of samples. Comparing automated and visual inte...

The clinical usefulness of antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies (ANCAs) in the monitoring of patients treated for small vessel vasculitis is debated. A capture enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) based on anti-proteinase 3 (anti-PR3) monoclonal antibody 4A3 has previously been proven to be superior to indirect immunofluorescence (IIF) and standard ELISA for the diagnosis of vasculitis. T...