A research team at Day Zero Diagnostics has presented a novel approach to antimicrobial susceptibility testing using artificial intelligence (AI) to guide the analysis.
The research team shared findings from their new AI-based system during a presentation at ASM Microbe, the American Society for Microbiology's annual meeting, held in Atlanta from June 13 to 17.
The system, called Keynome gAST (Genomic Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing), analyses the entire genome of bacteria extracted from a patient's blood sample, eliminating the need for culture.
Rather than relying on known resistance genes for analysis, as traditional methods do, Keynome gAST's machine learning algorithms autonomously identify resistance and susceptibility factors based on data from a continuously expanding database that currently contains more than 75,000 bacterial genomes and 800,000 susceptibility test results (at the time of the study, the database contained 48,000 bacterial genomes and 450,000 susceptibility test results).
“These results are the first to demonstrate comprehensive, highly accurate antimicrobial susceptibility and resistance predictions on clinical samples taken directly from blood,” said Jason Wittenbach, PhD, Director of Data Science at Day Zero and lead author of the study. “This is an important demonstration of the feasibility of machine learning-based rapid diagnostics for antimicrobial resistance, which has the potential to revolutionize treatment, reduce hospital stays, and save lives.”
The interim findings, published in ASM Microbe, are based on a study conducted at four Boston-area hospitals. While the Day Zero team acknowledged limitations in the group size and noted that further research is needed, they said that with the growing threat of antibiotic resistance and the need for rapid diagnosis and treatment of sepsis, the findings could contribute to significantly improving patient outcomes.
Funding for this research was provided in part by the Combating Antibiotic Resistance Biopharmaceuticals Accelerator (CARB-X), a non-profit partnership that advances research and development to combat the global threat of drug-resistant bacteria.
