Establishment of Multiplex qPCR System for Common Pathogens and Its Application In the Detection of Fracture Related Infections

Abstract Background: The study aims to use five common pathogenic bacteria in Fracture-related infection (FRI) to establish a simple and fast multiplex qPCR method for initially clinical FRI detection. Methods: A total of 66 patients with FRI and 24 noninfectious volunteers were enrolled. Results from tissue culture and multiplex qPCR were analyzed and compared. The sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV), Youden Index and area under the ROC curve (AUC) of the two methods were calculated respectively. Results: For 66 FRI cases, tissue culture detected 63 cases (95.5%) and multiplex qPCR detected 56 cases (84.8%). Among the 24 control cases, 12.5% and 16.7% were detected positive by tissue culture and multiplex qPCR, respectively. The sensitivity and specificity of multiplex qPCR were 84.8% and 66.7%, while those of tissue culture were 95.4% and 87.5%, respectively. To 51 cases within the detection profile, five common pathogens of FRI, the sensitivity and specificity of PCR changed to 92.2% and 90.9%, respectively. Conclusion: The advantage of multiplex qPCR is short processing time (< 5h) and simple steps. The multiplex qPCR may provide a complemental method for clinical FRI detection due to the simplicity and rapidity.