Introduction

The primary objective of susceptibility testing in clinic is to predict the treatment effect of an infected individual with chosen antimicrobial agents. Results must be derived in a timely manner with a high degree of accuracy and reproducibility. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) is usually carried out to determine which antimicrobial agent will be most successful in treating a bacterial infection in vivo. Clinical laboratories can choose to determine the susceptibility of bacteria by a number of methods mainly including disc diffusion, dilution (broth microdilution method, broth microdilution method and agar dilution), serial dilution (E-test) minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) determination1,2, of which can be performed manually or automatically.