Hospital Hygiene

A healthcare-associated infection (HAI) is an infection acquired in a hospital or healthcare environment. It can be transmitted by healthcare staff, patients or visitors, contaminated equipment or bedding, or by airborne droplets.

HAI are a significant problem for health care systems. Proactive hygiene management and infection control are key to prevention.

Fast and effective strain typing methods can help improve hospital hygiene and infection control, particularly in understanding the pathogenesis of infection.

The Bruker IR Biotyper^® system supports proactive infection control. The latest software version, IR Biotyper^® 4.0, combines fast and effective microorganism strain typing in a simple, easy to use workflow.

Faced with multi-resistant organism outbreaks or unusual sample resistance patterns, healthcare institutions need information on the strain or subspecies – as fast as possible. Traditional typing technologies such as pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE), multi locus sequencing (MLST) or whole genome sequencing (WGS) are not commonly available in the routine microbiology laboratory and are time-consuming and resource intensive.

The IR Biotyper^® Fourier Transform - Infra-Red (FT-IR) spectroscopy solution is a highly specific fingerprinting system that rapidly classifies microorganisms at subspecies level.

The IR Biotyper^® system analyses typical molecular vibrations caused by the absorption of infrared light. The absorption bands are assigned to certain chemical structures, whereas the wavelength range of the carbohydrates play the major role for strain differentiation or contributes most to differentiate. The new IR Biotyper^® software version extends the system’s spectral range to also include lipids and peptides to reveal further options for strain differentiation.

The IR Biotyper^® offers fast and easy sample preparation of up to 30 isolates within 30 minutes. With high discriminatory power comparable to routine molecular methods, one cost-effective run delivers results within three hours.  

To maximize efficiencies in the lab, the latest IR Biotyper^® software version allows integration with Bruker’s market leading MALDI Biotyper^® (MBT) systems using MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry. This powerful combination brings together the rapid microorganism identification capability of the MBT with IR strain typing in a seamless workflow.

Known strains can be detected as an immediate match, using the new IR Biotyper^® classification tools which are based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and now also with a Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm. Classifying isolates using predefined models means hospitals and healthcare providers can identify and monitor the transmission routes of pathogens in real time, supporting fast preventive action.

Predefined isolate classification, based on (ANN and/or SVM) models, also supports the creation of customized strain typing methods for use in future classification experiments. This allows users to continually update their system data with local findings for improved accuracy of results.

The IR Biotyper^® 4.0 software version offers a choice of result formats depending on the data exploration method selected.

• Traffic light reporting
  Operators can see and interpret results rapidly with the IR Biotyper^® user-friendly traffic light visualization.

• 3D scatter plots
  A 3D scatter plot allows easy visualization of related and non-related strains identified by dimensional reduction methods.

The IR Biotyper^® 4.0 software supports laboratory workflow optimization and automation. Features include customizable metadata, templates for intuitive run setup and easy project creation.

The IR Biotyper^® offers software integration with Bruker’s MALDI Biotyper^® (MBT) Compass software, facilitating data management via sample information import from the MBT Compass software into the IR Biotyper^® software and export to a laboratory information system (LIS).