DETECTION AND IDENTIFICATION OF ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANT UPEC USING FTIR-MICROSCOPY AND ADVANCED MULTIVARIATE ANALYSIS

Uraib Sharaha ¹ Eladio Rodriguez-Diazb ² Orli Sagi ³ Klaris Riesenberg ⁴ Ahmad Salman ⁵ Irving J. Bigio ⁶ Mahmoud Huleihel ¹

¹The Shraga Segal Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Genetics, BGU Ben-Gurion University, Beer-Sheva, Israel
²Department of Medicine, Section of Gastroenterology, Boston University School of Medicine., Boston, USA
³Director of Microbiology Laboratory, Soroka University Medical Center, Beer-Sheva, Israel
⁴Soroka University Medical Center, Soroka University Medical Center, Beer-Sheva, Israel
⁵Department of Physics, SCE - Shamoon College of Engineering, Beer-Sheva, Israel
⁶Department of Biomedical Engineering, Boston University School of Medicine., Boston, USA

Abstract

Antimicrobial drugs have an important role in controlling illness associated with bacterial infectious diseases in animals and humans. However, the increasing resistance of bacteria to a broad spectrum of commonly used antibiotics has become a global health-care problem. Rapid determination of antimicrobial susceptibility of clinical isolates is often crucial for the optimal antimicrobial therapy of infected patients and in many cases can save lives. The conventional methods used in medical centers for susceptibility testing are time-consuming (at least 2 days). Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) microscopy is rapid, safe, and low cost method that enables measuring unprecedented biochemical information from cells at the molecular level. The main goal of this study is to evaluate the potential of the FTIR microscopy in tandem with machine learning algorithms for rapid and reliable identification of bacterial susceptibility to antibiotics in time span of few minutes. Urine tract infection (UTI) E. coli bacterial samples from midstream specimen of urine were examined for their susceptibility to different antibiotics by FTIR microscopy. Our results showed that it was possible to classify the tested E. coli bacterial samples into sensitive and resistant with success rate higher than 85% for the five tested antibiotics cotrimoxazole, piperacillin/tazobactam, ceftazidime, ceftriaxone and fosfomycin.