One Year in the Life of a Rapid Syndromic Panel for Meningitis/Encephalitis: a Pediatric Tertiary Care Facility's Experience

Abstract

Early establishment of infectious processes allows for expedited clinical management of meningitis and encephalitis. The FilmArray meningitis/encephalitis (FA-M/E) panel provides rapid detection of potential pathogens associated with encephalitis/meningitis in both immunocompetent and compromised patients. Here, we conducted a 1-year review of the performance of the FA-M/E panel at a tertiary care children's hospital. Two hundred sixty-five samples from 251 patients were tested. We found 87.25% (219/251) were negative, 9.96% (25/251) were positive for viral analytes, and 3.19% (8/251) were positive for bacterial analytes. When possible, positive results were confirmed by alternate testing; 4/6 available bacterial positives and 17/20 available viral positives were confirmed by retrospective culture or molecular testing.

Keywords: FilmArray; encephalitis; meningitis; pediatric; syndromic panel.

FIG 1

Detection of FA-M/E panel pathogens between 1 July 2016 and 31 June 2017, displayed as a stacked area graph. The x axis represents a count of each organism or combination of organisms detected, including negative results. FA-M/E results were binned by weekly increments. The order of organisms in the key matches the stacked area graph from top to bottom.