AST Automation System Rapidly Diagnoses Blood Stream Infection for Early Treatment Initiation

By LabMedica International staff writers
Posted on 12 May 2022

Image: Radian BC guarantees the shortest four hours incubation time for positive blood culture samples (Photo courtesy of Copan Group)

Every year, 30 million people worldwide get affected by a blood stream infection, pathologies often caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria and characterized by up to 30% mortality. In these patients, reducing the time to diagnosis is not simply a good service, as the rapidity of appropriate treatment initiation may decrease their short-term mortality. Thus, any slight improvement in the complex and multitasked workflow that interposes between a blood sample collection and diagnosis can be life-saving. Now, a new antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) automation system guarantees the shortest four hours incubation time for positive blood culture samples, thereby reducing the incubation time for blood stream infection patients to allow for early intervention with a targeted antimicrobial therapy.

Copan Group’s (Brescia, Italy) Radian is an integrated module of the company’s full lab automation ecosystem that already eases the AST tasks of healthcare professionals by automating antibiotic disks application on WASPLab streaked plates, followed by automated incubation, digital imaging, and interpretation to derive antibiotic susceptibility results. Disk diffusion is the only antibiotic susceptibility testing that provides a true image of bacterial growth, enabling microbiologists to detect culture purity, heterogeneous growth or colony morphology, as well as antibiotic interactions, to adapt antimicrobial treatment more rapidly. With Radian, automation gets rid of the disadvantages linked to manual disk diffusion while maintaining at the same time its original advantages.

Copan has now pushed Radian even further to develop Radian BC. Integrating EUCAST Rapid AST Rules (R-AST) into the automated workflow, Radian BC is the first platform to provide accurate therapy indications for blood stream infection patients with just a four hour incubation period. Like no other AST automation available today, Radian BC guarantees the shortest four hours incubation time for positive blood culture samples. By reducing the incubation time for blood stream infection patients to a quarter, Radian BC ensures to specialists unparalleled rapid diagnostic assessment, directing each patient towards an early intervention with a targeted antimicrobial therapy.

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Copan Group