الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
FN is considered a medical emergency as fever may be the only symptom of severe underlying infection. BSIs are considered one of the most frequent infectious complications during neutropenia, responsible for considerable morbidity and mortality among these patients.
Although the administration of empiric antimicrobial therapy dramatically reduced mortality in FN patients, the changed spectrum of infections specifically, MDROs, together with the undesirable consequences of antimicrobial overuse, call for the necessity of timely diagnosis of infections and the implementation of antimicrobial stewardship strategies to optimize antimicrobial use in these patients.
The rapid identification and determination of antimicrobial susceptibility of pathogens causing BSIs can help in early initiation of targeted antimicrobial therapy. This can improve clinical outcome and allow de-escalation of broad empirical antimicrobial therapy thus reducing over-prescription and associated adverse effects.
BC remains the reference standard for the diagnosis of BSIs. However, the conventional method has a long TAT. Consequently, conventional BC and AST methods are progressively being supplemented by novel diagnostic techniques that provide results hours to days earlier than the standard approaches.
Several phenotypic methods such as VITEK 2 have been used directly on BC bottles for rapid ID and AST to improve the rate of bacterial detection. Besides, different genotypic methods, applied directly on BC bottles or whole blood specimens, are available for rapid diagnosis of BSIs including PCR assays. Certain PCR-based assays have the ability to identify particular bacterial pathogens, whereas broad-range bacterial PCR has the potential to detect any bacterial species.