Clinical utility of PCR compared to conventional culture and sensitivity testing for the management of complicated urinary tract infections in adults: Part I. Assessment of clinical outcomes, investigator satisfaction scores, and turnaround times
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: Managing complicated urinary tract infections (cUTIs) poses significant challenges, often resulting in the overprescription of empiric antibiotics. This approach exposes patients to multiple antimicrobials and raises the risk of inadequate treatment efficacy. The purpose of this study is to assess and compare the clinical utility of molecular testing (PCR) versus conventional culture and sensitivity (C&S) in managing cUTI, to identify optimal management strategies for cUTI patients. MATERIALS AND METHODS: 773 symptomatic adult patients with suspected cUTI diagnosis were randomized (1:1) into either the PCR-guided treatment group or the control group (C&S-guided) and followed up for 28 days. The primary outcome measure was the number (and percentage) of patients in each study arm with favorable clinical outcomes at the end of the study visit. RESULTS: Overall, 468 patients completed all study procedures, and of those, data from 362 patients were analyzed (193 PCR arm, 169 C&S arm) for this Part 1 of the primary study analysis. Treatments guided by PCR results provided significantly better clinical outcomes compared to treatments guided by conventional C&S results (88.08 % vs. 78.11, p = 0.011), with a significantly shorter mean turnaround time (49.68 h vs. 104.4 h, p < 0.001), and a significant higher investigator satisfaction total score (23.95 ± 1.96 vs. 20.64 ± 4.12, p < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: This data demonstrated the clinical utility of PCR in improving therapeutic clinical outcomes and facilitating expedited, patient-specific management of cUTI for optimal patient care. Furthermore, this study showed a clear preference among investigators for PCR over C&S when making clinical decisions and managing patients with cUTI.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".