BD has launched a Urine Culture Application in the USA, which is for use with the BD Kiestra™ lab automation incubation and imaging system and can transform the way microbiology labs approach urine culture analysis.

Designed using artificial intelligence (AI) and leveraging the quality of BD BBL™ plated media, the application uses digital imaging and software algorithms to determine the amount of growth on a urine culture plate from clean caught and catheterized samples. The BD Kiestra™ system's intelligent incubation and imaging device uses high-throughput robotics to perform time series imaging, coupled with machine learning so that plates with no significant growth can be released for disposal and plates with significant growth automatically go into a queue for clinician analysis.

In many labs, urine cultures make up a significant part of the daily workload — however, the majority of those samples have no growth or non-significant growth and don't require any additional work-up. Batch review of large volumes of plates with non-significant growth and release can help medical laboratorians focus their time and expertise on more clinically relevant tasks.

"The use of the Urine Culture Application to automatically organize specimens into meaningful worklists driven by user-defined expert rules for critical criteria such as 'high risk patients' or 'complex specimens' will help laboratories work more efficiently and better prioritize their efforts to focus on the most critical and complex specimens," said Cecilia Soriano, vice president and general manager for Microbiology at BD Integrated Diagnostic Solutions. "Reading plates is one of the laboratory tasks that requires the most skill and given the decrease of skilled technicians entering the workforce and the strain on resources created by the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that much more critical for labs to be able to be more efficient."

Powered by BD Synapsys™ informatics solution, the BD Kiestra™ Urine Culture application (UCA) may help improve lab efficiency and enhance quality by providing diagnostically relevant, standardized images for interpretation by laboratory staff. The new Urine Culture app can be used with both standalone BD Kiestra™ ReadA systems as well as track-based BD Kiestra™ laboratory automation solutions.

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