Department of Physics, Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
Department of Hematology, Soroka University Medical Center, Beer-Sheva, Israel.
J Biophotonics. 2020 Feb;13(2):e201900215. doi: 10.1002/jbio.201900215. Epub 2019 Dec 17.
Rapid diagnosis of the etiology of infection is highly important for an effective treatment of the infected patients. Bacterial and viral infections are serious diseases that can cause death in many cases. The human immune system deals with many viral and bacterial infections that cause no symptoms and pass quietly without treatment. However, oncology patients undergoing chemotherapy have a very weak immune system caused by leukopenia, and even minor pathogen infection threatens their lives. For this reason, physicians tend to prescribe immediately several types of antibiotics for febrile pediatric oncology patients (FPOPs). Uncontrolled use of antibiotics is one of the major contributors to the development of resistant bacteria. Therefore, for oncology patients, a rapid and objective diagnosis of the etiology of the infection is extremely critical. Current identification methods are time-consuming (>24 h). In this study, the potential of midinfrared spectroscopy in tandem with machine learning algorithms is evaluated for rapid and objective diagnosis of the etiology of infections in FPOPs using simple peripheral blood samples. Our results show that infrared spectroscopy enables the diagnosis of the etiology of infection as bacterial or viral within 70 minutes after the collection of the blood sample with 93% sensitivity and 88% specificity.
快速诊断感染的病因对于有效治疗感染患者非常重要。细菌和病毒感染是严重的疾病，在许多情况下可导致死亡。人类免疫系统可应对许多无明显症状的病毒和细菌感染，这些感染未经治疗可悄然过去。然而，正在接受化疗的肿瘤患者因白细胞减少而免疫系统非常薄弱，即使是轻微的病原体感染也会威胁到他们的生命。出于这个原因，医生往往会立即为发热儿科肿瘤患者（FPOPs）开几种类型的抗生素。抗生素的不合理使用是耐药菌发展的主要原因之一。因此，对于肿瘤患者来说，快速、客观地诊断感染的病因极其关键。目前的鉴定方法耗时较长（>24 小时）。在这项研究中，我们评估了中红外光谱与机器学习算法相结合，使用简单的外周血样本，快速、客观地诊断 FPOPs 感染的病因的潜力。我们的研究结果表明，红外光谱能够在采集血液样本后 70 分钟内，以 93%的灵敏度和 88%的特异性，诊断出感染的病因是细菌或病毒。
