Ab.ai - A Novel Automated AI Tool for Reporting Antibiograms.

Abstract

Anti-Microbial Resistance is one of the greatest threats that mankind faces right now due to the inappropriate use of antibiotics. Institution of appropriate antibiotics in right dose for the right patient at right time is the "gamechanger" in fighting AMR. Antibiotic Sensitivity Testing (AST) or antibiogram is done to ascertain the sensitivity profile of the organism. The most widely used method in laboratory practice in India is the Kirby-Bauer's disk diffusion test. There are few shortcomings in the manual interpretation of antibiograms in the form of high inter-operator variability, mandatory requirement of trained microbiologists - which is difficult in low-resource settings and high degree of interpersonal bias due to various factors like stress, workload, and visual acuity. We propose the Ab.ai tool for automating the AST procedures in laboratory. The Ab.ai tool comprises of 3 phases: first for data collection, second for data processing and the third for generation of antibiotic sensitivity reports. Various software packages like OpenCV and EasyOCR are used for the development of the Ab.ai tool. A total of 50 antibiograms of both GPC and GNB are interpreted both by manual and automated method. The manual method is considered the "gold-standard" and the performance of Ab.ai tool was compared against the manual method. The Ab.ai tool achieved an agreement of 98.4% on susceptibility categorization of GPC antibiotics and 97.6% on that of GNB antibiotics against the gold standard manual method. The proposed Ab.ai tool serves as a perfect candidate for automating AST procedures and would prove to be a "game-changer" in battling AMR.