Rapid antibiotic susceptibility testing in blood culture diagnostics performed by direct inoculation using the VITEK®-2 and BD Phoenix™ platforms

Early availability of microbiological results can improve treatment decisions of patients suffering from bloodstream infections. Direct inoculation of automated susceptibility testing (AST) platforms is an approach to shorten time-to-result in blood culture diagnostics. We performed a comparative evaluation of the two commercial AST systems VITEK®-2 and BD Phoenix™ for the direct inoculation with blood culture samples. Furthermore, two different methods of sample preparation were compared in this study. Positive blood cultures were prepared for direct inoculation by use of serum separator tubes and twofold centrifugation. AST was performed with the VITEK®-2 and the BD Phoenix™ system by the standard method according to the manufacturer’s recommendations using subcultures on solid media and by direct inoculation of blood culture samples. A hundred clinical samples from blood cultures were included in this study. Rapid AST by direct inoculation showed inter-test agreement rates ranging from 92.45 to 97.7%. Comparing both AST platforms, the VITEK®-2 system demonstrated a higher test accuracy for direct inoculation. No relevant difference was observed for the two different sample preparation methods. Direct inoculation is an easy and inexpensive approach to obtain early full panel phenotypic AST results in blood culture diagnostics. Sample preparation is sufficiently performed by a simple centrifugation method. Both commercial platforms, the VITEK®-2 and the BD Phoenix™, have proven suitable for the use of direct inoculation.