An Evaluation of the Rapid Antimicrobial Susceptibility Test by VITEK MS and VITEK 2 Systems in Blood Culture

The results of rapid antimicrobial susceptibility test (AST) in blood cultures were obtained by inoculating the bacteria directly into the VITEK MS and the VITEK 2 systems without subculturing in the blood culture positive medium. The obtained results were compared with the results using a standard method to evaluate their reliability and accuracy. The direct AST results in blood culture positive specimens were 97.9% (1,936/1,978), consistent with the standard AST results. Gram-positive bacteria showed a concordance rate of 97.2% (1,051/1,081), a very major error rate of 0.5% (5/1,081), a major error rate of 0.1% (1/1,081), and a minor error rate of 2.2% (24/1,081). Staphylococcus epidermidis was the main cause of discordance, and gentamicin (N=9) and fusidic acid (N=8) showed high errors. The overall concordance rate and minor error among the Gram-negative bacteria were 98.6% (885/897) and 1.4% (12/897), respectively. Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa were the major causative bacteria of Gram-negative bacteria. Among them, amoxicillin/clavulanic acid (N=3) showed high error. Direct AST met the CLSI criteria and shortened the reporting time by 24 hours; however, we found that there was a need to perform an addition test via disk diffusion for antimicrobials with very large errors. These results suggest that the method of direct AST in blood culture positive medium may be very useful in efficiently treating patients.