Human viral and bacterial infections are responsible for a variety of diseases that are still the main causes of death and economic burden for society across the globe. Despite the different responses of the immune system to these infections, some of them have similar symptoms, such as fever, sneezing, inflammation, vomiting, diarrhea, and fatigue. Thus, physicians usually encounter difficulties in distinguishing between viral and bacterial infections on the basis of these symptoms. Rapid identification of the etiology of infection is highly important for effective treatment and can save lives in some cases. The current methods used for the identification of the nature of the infection are mainly based on growing the infective agent in culture, which is a time-consuming (over 24 h) and usually expensive process. The main objective of this study was to evaluate the potential of the mid-infrared spectroscopic method for rapid and reliable identification of bacterial and viral infections based on simple peripheral blood samples. For this purpose, white blood cells (WBCs) and plasma were isolated from the peripheral blood samples of patients with confirmed viral or bacterial infections. The obtained spectra were analyzed by multivariate analysis: principle component analysis (PCA) followed by linear discriminant analysis (LDA), to identify the infectious agent type as bacterial or viral in a time span of about 1 h after the collection of the blood sample. Our preliminary results showed that it is possible to determine the infectious agent with high success rates of 82% for sensitivity and 80% for specificity, based on the WBC data.
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.
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