COPAN’s PhenoMATRIX fuses the power of Artificial Intelligence and culture to detect highly sensitive GBS

COPAN's PhenoMATRIX provides accurate results eliminates the need to review each plate manually saving time and freeing up technicians to focus on more complex tasks.

Normally, the presence of Group B Streptococcus (GBS) is nothing to worry about, but for pregnant women, this Gram-positive bacterium can be deadly — if transferred to infants during labor. An accurate test is crucial since intrapartum antibiotics significantly reduce the spread of GBS from mom to baby.

Dr. Susan Sharp, Scientific Director, COPAN Diagnostics’ said: “COPAN’s PhenoMATRIX not only was able to detect more true positive cultures than manual review of digital culture images, but it shows that chromogenic cultures together with artificial intelligence algorithms can detect GBS colonization with the same high sensitivity as molecular detection systems.” 

The study, which was published on October 21, 2020, evaluated the performance of the PhenoMatrix Chromogenic Detection Moa dule digital imaging software’s ability to detect GBS from LIM broth plated on bioMérieux’s CHROMID Strepto B at two clinical laboratories. After 48 hours of incubation, the sensitivity of COPAN’s PhenoMATRIX was similar to the BD MAX GBS molecular test — 95.5% to 96.8% respectively — and significantly higher than manual at 90.3%.

Another noteworthy discovery was that COPAN’s software never inaccurately called a culture that was determined to be a positive-negative, and it identified an additional eight true positive specimens that were missed by manual reading. This finding establishes that the innovative PhenoMATRIX AI, plus classic culture, is quite the powerful combination at a fraction of the cost of molecular testing.

Sharp added: “COPAN’s AI software, along with the use of chromogenic agars has made our decades-old agar culture for the detection of pathogens ‘new’ again.” 

PhenoMATRIX is an advanced set of highly sophisticated AI that gives WASPLab users the power to automatically pre-assess and pre-sort culture plates, read, interpret and segregate bacterial cultures. By grouping negative cultures, which are the majority of the cultures screened, staff can quickly review up to 40 plates per computer screen and batch release negative results eliminating the need to review each plate manually saving time and freeing up technicians to focus on more complex tasks.

Leave a Reply