Automatic digital plate reading for surveillance cultures

Abstract

The automation of specimen processing and culture workup has rapidly emerged in clinical microbiology laboratories throughout the world and more recently in the United States. While many U.S. laboratories have implemented some form of automated specimen processing and some have begun performing digital plate reading, automated colony analysis is just beginning to be utilized clinically. In this issue of the Journal of Clinical Microbiology, M. L. Faron et al. (J Clin Microbiol 54:2470-2475, 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.1128/JCM.01040-16) report the results of their evaluation of the performance of the WASPLab Chromogenic Detection Module (CDM) for categorizing chromogenic agar plates as negative or "nonnegative" for vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE). Their major finding was 100% sensitivity for detection of "nonnegative" specimens using CDM compared to manual methods for specimens plated on two different types of VRE chromogenic agar plates. Additionally, utilization of digital plate reading in conjunction with automated colony analysis was predicted to result in significant savings based on greatly reduced labor costs.