bThis meta-analysis included 12 studies that evaluated sonication fluid cultures (SFC) for the diagnosis of prosthetic joint infection (PJI). The pooled sensitivity and specificity were 0.80 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.74 to 0.84) and 0.95 (CI, 0.90 to 0.98), respectively. Subgroup analyses showed that a 14-day anaerobic culture may improve sensitivity, the use of centrifugation or vortexing may improve specificity, and the use of 400 to 500 ml of Ringer's solution for containers may improve sensitivity and specificity. The best SFC cutoff was >5 CFU. In conclusion, SFC has high sensitivity and very high specificity for diagnosing PJI. P rosthetic joint infection (PJI), which occurs in 1 to 12% of surgical cases, is a common catastrophic complication of joint replacement (1-3). Hence, distinguishing PJI from other causes of joint failure, such as metal allergy or aseptic loosening, is important (4). Several tests for diagnosing PJI, including laboratory tests, nuclear medicine detection, rapid molecular tests, histopathology, and microbiologic culture (5-7), have limited sensitivity and specificity, which impedes the differentiation of PJI from other prosthetic failures (3,4,8).Sonication fluid cultures (SFC), which use sonication to dislodge bacteria from the prosthetic surface, have shown promising improvements in sensitivity compared with that for traditional tissue cultures (9). However, the sensitivities (range, 0.67 to 0.91) and specificities (range, 0.72 to 1.0) among studies assessing the diagnostic value of SFC for PJI are inconsistent (9-21). The Infectious Diseases Society of America guidelines suggest a gap in the validation of the diagnostic value of SFC for PJI and request additional higher-level evidence (8). Therefore, we evaluated the detection validity of SFC for PJI to provide further evidence for its clinical use.We searched Medline, EMBASE, and OVID for articles published between January 1990 and August 2013, using the following medical subject headings or free-text words: joint prosthesis, prosthesis infection, septic loosening, aseptic loosening, replacement, or arthroplasty; and sonication, sonicate, or ultrasonicate. We also manually searched the reference lists of eligible studies