The value of blood cultures for confirming the clinical diagnosis of sepsis is suboptimal. There is growing interest in the potential of real-time PCR technology by detection of minute amounts of pathogen DNA in patient blood samples with results available within 4-6 h. Adopting a two-step approach, we evaluated the compliance of two versions of the MicrobScan assay on a total of 748 patients with suspected bloodstream infections. The results obtained with a second version of the MicrobScan assay are characterized by increased specificity (from 95.1 to 98.2%) and sensitivity (from 76.7 to 85.1), increased throughput and the possibility of simultaneously testing different kinds of samples collected from the potential sites of infection and utilizing different syndromic panels.
Keywords: MicrobScan assay; bacteremia; blood culture; bloodstream infection; diagnosis of sepsis; microbial DNA; molecular diagnosis; molecular microbiology; multiplex PCR; sepsis.