Phase Contrast Image-Based Rapid Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing of Bacteria in Liquid Culture Media

Currently, the world is facing the problem of bacterial resistance, which threatens public health, and bacterial antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) plays an important role in biomedicine, dietary safety and aquaculture. Traditional AST methods take a long time, usually 16–24 h, and cannot meet the demand for rapid diagnosis in the clinic, so rapid AST methods are needed to shorten the detection time. In this study, by using an in-house built centrifuge to centrifuge bacteria in a liquid medium onto the inner wall of the bottom surface of a counting plate, and using a phase contrast microscope to track bacterial growth under the effect of different antibiotic concentrations, the results of the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of bacteria under the effect of antibiotics can be obtained in as early as 4 h. We used a combination of E. coli and tigecycline and obtained MIC results that were consistent with those obtained using the gold standard broth micro-dilution method, demonstrating the validity of our method; due to the time advantage, the complete set can be used in the future for point of care and clinical applications, helping physicians to quickly obtain the MIC used to inhibit bacterial growth.