Friday, July 12, 2024

AI able to identify drug-resistant typhoid-like infection from microscopy images in matter of hours

Good news! And this is only the beginning!

The so called antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is much less a problem than it is made to be! More hysteria than reality! Human ingenuity will defeat AMR!

"... One of the challenges facing healthcare workers is the ability to distinguish rapidly between organisms that can be treated with first-line drugs and those that are resistant to treatment. Conventional testing can take several days, requiring bacteria to be cultured, tested against various antimicrobial treatments, and analysed by a laboratory technician or by machine. This delay often results in patients being treated with an inappropriate drug, which can lead to more serious outcomes and, potentially, further drive drug resistance. ...
The algorithm was able to correctly predict in each case whether or not bacteria were susceptible or resistant to ciprofloxacin without the need for the bacteria to be exposed to the drug. This was the case for isolates cultured for just six hours, compared to the usual 24 hours to culture a sample in the presence of antibiotic. ..."

From the abstract:
"Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a growing public health crisis that requires innovative solutions. Current susceptibility testing approaches limit our ability to rapidly distinguish between antimicrobial-susceptible and -resistant organisms. Salmonella Typhimurium (S. Typhimurium) is an enteric pathogen responsible for severe gastrointestinal illness and invasive disease. Despite widespread resistance, ciprofloxacin remains a common treatment for Salmonella infections, particularly in lower-resource settings, where the drug is given empirically. Here, we exploit high-content imaging to generate deep phenotyping of S. Typhimurium isolates longitudinally exposed to increasing concentrations of ciprofloxacin. We apply machine learning algorithms to the imaging data and demonstrate that individual isolates display distinct growth and morphological characteristics that cluster by time point and susceptibility to ciprofloxacin, which occur independently of ciprofloxacin exposure. Using a further set of S. Typhimurium clinical isolates, we find that machine learning classifiers can accurately predict ciprofloxacin susceptibility without exposure to it or any prior knowledge of resistance phenotype. These results demonstrate the principle of using high-content imaging with machine learning algorithms to predict drug susceptibility of clinical bacterial isolates. This technique may be an important tool in understanding the morphological impact of antimicrobials on the bacterial cell to identify drugs with new modes of action."

AI able to identify drug-resistant typhoid-like infection from microscopy images in matter of hours | University of Cambridge Artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to identify drug resistant infections, significantly reducing the time taken for a correct diagnosis ...The team showed that an algorithm could be trained to identify drug-resistant bacteria correctly from microscopy images alone.


Fig. 2: Morphological features associated with ciprofloxacin exposure.


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