Study toward the integration of a system for bacterial growth monitoring in an automated specimen processing platform

As bacterial infection diseases represent a relevant threat for human health worldwide, many efforts are spent in accelerating the diagnostic process of biological specimens. The WASPLab automated platform, by COPAN Italia S.p.A., detects bacterial growth by processing the images of the Petri dishes containing a sample to analyze. This work presents a study performed on a developed system that exploits impedance measurement to monitor bacterial growth in Petri dishes in real time. It is part of an activity aiming at system integration in the WASPLab, to enhance its monitoring capabilities and flexibility. Through repeated 24-h tests executed with the system, we successfully detected S. aureus growth in Petri dishes that were inside one of the WASPLab incubators, starting from impedance measurements performed at 50–150 Hz. In particular, depending on the parameter being observed, detection time was between four and six hours, for an initial bacterial concentration in the order of 4.5· 10 7 CFU/ml. These preliminary results represent the first step for evaluating system integration in the WASPLab.