Computer-assisted bacterial identification utilizing antimicrobial susceptibility profiles generated by autobac 1.

A computer program was developed to identify bacteria solely on the basis of their relative susceptibility to various antimicrobial agents. A sample of 481 clinical isolates from nine of the most commonly isolated gram-negative groups was identified by the quadratic discriminant function technique. Various combinations of antimicrobials were tried, and one set of 18 resulted in a more than 97% correlation with conventional identification procedures. The antimicrobial set could be decreased to 14, while a better than 95% correlation with the conventional procedures was maintained.