Rapid antibiotic susceptibility testing of bacteria by single-field tracking centrifugation of bacteria solution

The misuse of antibiotics has led to the emergence of drug-resistant strains of bacteria, increasing the difficulty and cost of medical treatment. Antibiotic susceptibility testing(AST) of bacteria can guide doctors and other relevant personnel to issue the appropriate amount of antibiotics, and traditional AST methods cannot give timely results. Although the existing rapid AST methods can reduce the testing time to less than 4 hours, they still have problems of high complexity and high cost. In this study, we achieved rapid AST by centrifuging the bacterial solution, rapidly settling the bacteria to the bottom of the counting plate, and then tracking the growth of the bacteria in a single field of view. Our method is consistent with the results obtained by the gold standard microbial broth dilution method for AST experiments and reduces the time to 4 hours. Compared to other rapid AST methods, our method reduces cost and complexity and is suitable for clinical and point-of-care applications.