Alternative Serum Biomarkers of Bacteraemia for Intensive Care Unit Patients

The diagnosis of infections in hospital or clinical settings usually involves a series of time-consuming steps, including biological sample collection, culture growth of the organism isolation and subsequent characterization. For this, there are diverse infection biomarkers based on blood analysis, however, these are of limited use in patients presenting confound processes as inflammatory process as occurring at intensive care units. In this preliminary study, the application of serum analysis by FTIR spectroscopy, to predict bacteraemia in 102 critically ill patients in an ICU was evaluated. It was analysed the effect of spectra pre-processing methods and spectral sub-regions on t-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding. By optimizing Support Vector Machine (SVM) models, based on normalised second derivative spectra of a smaller subregion, it was possible to achieve a good bacteraemia predictive model with a sensitivity and specificity of 76%. Since FTIR spectra of serum is acquired in a simple, economic and rapid mode, the technique presents the potential to be a cost-effective methodology of bacteraemia identification, with special relevance in critically ill patients, where a rapid infection diagnostic will allow to avoid the unnecessary use of antibiotics, which ultimately will ease the load on already fragile patients' metabolism.