Abstract
Optics based technologies are being advanced by many diagnostic companies around the globe. This resurgence is being driven by several factors including novel materials, enhanced computer power, nonlinear optics, and advances in algorithmic and statistical analysis. This study expands on a previous paper that evaluated the capability of a reagent-free optical profiling platform technology that used multiwavelength transmission spectroscopy to identify bacterial pathogens from pure culture. This study combines multiwavelength angular scattering with transmission based analysis into a single algorithm that will identify bacterial pathogens. Six predominant organisms,S. aureus, E. coli,K. pneumoniaeandP. aeruginosa,E. faecalis,and coagulase negativeStaphylococcus, were analyzed from a total of 753 clinical isolates received from three large community hospital systems. The bacterial identification method used for comparison in this study was the Vitek-2 (bioMerieux) which utilizes a biochemically based identification system. All of the clinical isolates received were blinded as to their identification until completion of the optical analysis. Sensitivities ranged from 87.7 to 94.6% with specificities ranging from 97.2 to 99.9% indicating that optical profiling is a powerful and exciting new technology that could be developed for the rapid identification of pathogens without the use of chemical reagents.
Highlights
Accurate and rapid bacterial identification is essential for correct disease diagnosis, treatment of infection, and tracing back of disease outbreaks associated with microbial infections
Clinical methods for bacterial identification have relied on phenotypic identification of the causative organism using Gram staining, cultural growth characteristics, and biochemical reaction based techniques
Very good specificity values exceeding 97% were achieved for all target species. These values were somewhat lower than those obtained in the previous 204isolate study of only four target organisms, E. coli, K. pneumoniae, P. aeruginosa, and S. aureus [20]
Summary
Accurate and rapid bacterial identification is essential for correct disease diagnosis, treatment of infection, and tracing back of disease outbreaks associated with microbial infections. Alternatives to the phenotypic methods for bacterial identification available today include a variety of spectroscopy and spectrometry based methodologies in various stages of investigation and development [2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14] Many of these systems require less than 6 hours for specimen analysis, can analyze whole bacterial cells [6], are reproducible over a broad mass range, and are often specific enough to identify antibioticresistant bacteria [12, 13]. Despite this renewed interest in spectroscopic analysis, there exists a persistent focus on the use of either the scattering properties of the cells [9, 15, 16]
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