Rapid antimicrobial susceptibility test using spatiotemporal analysis of laser speckle dynamics of bacterial colonies

Antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) is crucial for providing appropriate choices and doses of antibiotics to patients. However, standard ASTs require a time-consuming incubation of about 16-20 h for visual accumulation of bacteria, limiting the use of AST for an early prescription. In this study, we propose a rapid AST based on laser speckle formation (LSF) that enables rapid detection of bacterial growth, with the same sample preparation protocol as in solid-based ASTs. The proposed method exploits the phenomenon that well-grown bacterial colonies serve as optical diffusers, which convert a plane-wave laser beam into speckles. The generation of speckle patterns indicates bacterial growth at given antibiotic concentrations. Speckle formation is evaluated by calculating the spatial autocorrelation of speckle images, and bacterial growth is determined by tracking the autocorrelation value over time. We demonstrated the performance of the proposed method for several combinations of bacterial species and antibiotics to achieve the AST in 2-4.5 hours. Furthermore, we also demonstrated the sensitivity of the technique for low bacterial density. The proposed method can be a powerful tool for rapid, simple, and low-cost AST. O_FIG O_LINKSMALLFIG WIDTH=200 HEIGHT=160 SRC="FIGDIR/small/853168v1_ufig1.gif" ALT="Figure 1"> View larger version (48K): org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@8ee314org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@de47c5org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@13a0103org.highwire.dtl.DTLVardef@118ad36_HPS_FORMAT_FIGEXP M_FIG C_FIG