ASSAY OF IMMUNOREACTIVE AND LIKE SUBSTANCES

摘要

The disclosed methods improve conventional agglutination processes for assaying immunoreactive and like substances, primarily by improving the measurement of the agglutination itself. Suspensions containing agglutinated particles are automatically inspected, preferably intermittently during the agglutinating reaction, and the resulting data are processed to identify individual particle aggregates of a selected limited class, which may, for example, comprise aggregates having sizes within a limited size interval. The numbers of such aggregates are compared with corresponding reference values obtained with standard solutions and suitable controls to evaluate the concentration of one of the reactive substances, or other information. The aggregate size intervals and other parameters which are used to define aggregate classes are preferably selected with attention to the detailed behavior of each test system.