Development of a diagnostic aid for bacterial infection in wounds

Abstract

Infection of wounds during hospitalisation often induces morbidity and sometimes mortality. The delay in patient recovery and subsequent increased length of hospital stay also has economic consequences. Standard techniques for microbiological detection are surface swabbing and wound biopsy culture. Surface swabbing is the most commonly used technique mainly because is quite inexpensive and is not invasive but can give only a representation of surface infection and analysis is also time consuming. Infected wounds are often characterised by an offensive odour that can be used as a diagnostic parameter. We report the results obtained by examining swabs and dressings taken from patients using a gas sensor array instrument developed as part of an EU funded project WOUNDMONITOR.

Differentiation between infected and non-infected wounds using an electronic nose

“…In addition, microbiological culture results are only available after a few days. Two earlier studies [15,16] have explored the potential of electronic noses to fulfil the need for accurate and fast detection of wound infection in clinical practice. They demonstrated that electronic noses are able to discriminate between specific microorganisms present in a wound swab.…”