Artificial Intelligence to Fight Antibiotic Resistance

• Antimicrobial resistance is a major global health threat and its development is promoted by antibiotic misuse.

• While disk diffusion antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST, also known as antibiogram) is broadly used to test for antibiotic resistance in bacterial infections, it faces strong criticism because of inter-operator variability and the complexity of interpretative reading.

• Testing the susceptibility of bacteria is important for patient treatment and, if done systematically, gathering data can provide precious epidemiological information.

• Automatic reading systems address these issues but are not always adapted or available to resource-limited settings.

• In this study, researchers suggested an artificial intelligence (AI) based, an offline smartphone application for antibiogram analysis. The application captures images with the phone’s camera, and the user is guided throughout the analysis on the same device by a user-friendly graphical interface.

• The fully automatic measurement procedure of our application’s reading system achieves an overall agreement of 90% on susceptibility categorization against a hospital-standard automatic system and 98% against the manual measurement (gold standard), with reduced inter-operator variability.

• The application’s performance showed that the automatic reading of antibiotic resistance testing is entirely feasible on a smartphone. Moreover, our application is suited for resource-limited settings and therefore has the potential to significantly increase patients’ access to AST worldwide.

19 February 2021

source:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21187-3

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-21187-3