Evaluation of a liquid-phase colorimetric method for rapid antibacterial susceptibility testing

Background and objective: early determination of antibacterial susceptibility increases the success of therapy,decreases unnecessary use of antibacterial agents and side-effects,and lowers the overall healthcare cost. materials and methods: a rapid colorimetric method for antibacterial susceptibility testing named qui-sensitest (inovative biotechnology organization,istanbul,turkey) was evaluated in this study. results: qui-sensitest proved to be a reliable rapid test for determining antibacterial susceptibility having an overall agreement of 97.6% with kirby bauer disk diffusion test results for enteric bacteria with 0.4% of major discrepancies and 2.0% of minor discrepancy. conclusion: since the test makes the results available in 3.5-6 hours,it can provide the means for choosing the right treatment regimen the same day the infectious agent is isolated.