Clinical Performance Evaluation of VersaTrek 528 Blood Culture System in a Chinese Tertiary Hospital

Background: The aim of this study was to evaluate the clinical performance of VersaTrek 528 compared to BACTEC FX 400 blood culture (BC) systems.Materials and Methods: Simulated and clinically obtained BCs were used in the study. Confirmed bacterial species (n = 78), including 43 Gram-positives, 30 Gram-negatives, and 5 Candida albicans strains, were each inoculated into BC bottles. Clinically obtained BCs were subdivided into two groups, A and B. In group A were 72 BC sets (pair: aerobic and anaerobic) in which a set inoculated with 5 ml blood was processed in the VersaTrek BC system, whilst the one inoculated with 10 ml blood was processed in the FX BC system. In group B, 76 BC sets (pairs) corresponding to 152 VersaTrek bottles and 152 FX bottles were inoculated with the same volume (10 ml) of blood, and processed in each system.Results: In the simulated BC study, 90% (63/70) of the VersaTrek aerobic bottles were positive, which was higher than that of FX 400 (59/70, 84%), but was not statistically significant (P = 0.423). In contrast, FX 400 anaerobic bottles had a higher positive rate than the other BC system (84 vs. 77%), although it was statistically insignificant (P = 0.267). Time to detection of organisms in the two BCs was comparable for both aerobic (P = 0.131) and anaerobic bottles (P = 0.104). In clinical BCs of group A, FX BC system had slightly higher positive rates for both aerobic (11.1 vs. 9.7%, P = 0.312) and anaerobic (8.3 vs. 6.9%, P = 0.375) bottles. However, the difference was not statistically significant. In group B, VersaTrek aerobic bottles had a higher positive rate compared to the other BC system (10.5 vs. 5.2%, P = 0.063). In terms of positive rates of sub-studies A and B, VersaTrek and FX BC systems were comparable.Conclusion: There was no significant difference between the two BC systems in the detection of bacteria and fungi in simulated BCs. In clinical BCs, the performance of the VersaTrek BC system, with inoculation of 5 or 10 ml patient’s blood, was comparable to the FX system with inoculation of 10 ml patient’s blood

Software Tools for 2D Cell Segmentation

Cell segmentation is an important task in the field of image processing, widely used in the life sciences and medical fields. Traditional methods are mainly based on pixel intensity and spatial relationships, but have limitations. In recent years, machine learning and deep learning methods have been widely used, providing more-accurate and efficient solutions for cell segmentation. The effort to develop efficient and accurate segmentation software tools has been one of the major focal points in the field of cell segmentation for years. However, each software tool has unique characteristics and adaptations, and no universal cell-segmentation software can achieve perfect results. In this review, we used three publicly available datasets containing multiple 2D cell-imaging modalities. Common segmentation metrics were used to evaluate the performance of eight segmentation tools to compare their generality and, thus, find the best-performing tool