Same-day identification and antibiotic susceptibility testing on positive blood cultures: a simple and inexpensive procedure

Fast diagnostic tools are becoming a hot topic in microbiology, especially in the case of septic patients. Therefore, we attempted to develop a fast, inexpensive, accurate and easy method to identify bacteria and perform an antibiotic susceptibility test directly on positive blood cultures that could be used in a routine laboratory. A procedure based on centrifugation and washing steps was performed on 110 non-duplicated (including nine seeded) positive blood culture bottles. Direct identification (DID) and antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) was conducted on the pellet with the MALDI Biotyper and Phoenix, respectively. Identification (ID) to the species level was correct in 44/45 (97%) cases for Gram-negative bacteria and 44/56 (79%) cases for Gram-positive bacteria. In total, 98.9% of the AST results were identical to the routine laboratory result. No very major errors, four major errors and eight minor errors were detected. A reliable identification and a high AST agreement were obtained from blood cultures seeded with multi-resistant bacteria. We simulated the timeline of DID and demonstrated an identification and AST result within 24 h using Escherichia coli- and Staphylococcus aureus-positive blood cultures as examples. We developed an easy, fast and cheap method to generate reliable ID and AST results. Moreover, this method may be used to obtain results within 24 h after incubating the blood culture bottles in the microbiology lab.