Culture-free detection of bacteria from blood for rapid sepsis diagnosis

Abstract Approximately 50 million people suffer from sepsis yearly, and 13 million die from it. For every hour a patient with septic shock is untreated, their survival rate decreases by 8%. Therefore, rapid detection and antibiotic susceptibility profiling of bacterial agents in the blood of sepsis patients are crucial for determining appropriate treatment. Here, we introduce a method to isolate bacteria from whole blood with high separation efficiency through Smart centrifugation , followed by microfluidic trapping and subsequent detection using deep learning applied to microscopy images. We detected, within 2 h, E. coli , K. pneumoniae , or E. faecalis from spiked samples of healthy human donor blood at clinically relevant concentrations as low as 9, 7 and 32 colony-forming units per ml of blood, respectively. However, the detection of S. aureus remains a challenge. This rapid isolation and detection represents a significant advancement towards culture-free detection of bloodstream infections.