bacterial burden in wounds
This excellent work from Le and coworkers strongly suggests that using a point of care diagnostic device (Moleculight) can identify elevated bacterial load and influence medical decision making … High bacterial load contributes to chronicity of wounds and is diagnosed based on assessment of clinical signs and symptoms (CSS) of infection, but these characteristics are poor predictors of bacterial burden. Point-of-care fluorescence imaging (FL) can improve identification of wounds with high bacterial burden (>104 CFU/g). FL detects bacteria, whether planktonic or in biofilm, but does not distinguish between the two … read more