Evaluation of the New Automatic Mycob.T Stainer and Scanner for Detecting Acid-fast Bacilli in China

To validate the performance of Mycob. T Stainer and Scanner (MTSS) for detecting acid-fast bacilli (AFB). A total of 3,816 sputum samples from 1,515 tuberculosis (TB) suspects were tested at the Anhui Provincial Chest Hospital and the Linyi People's Hospital from April-August, 2016. Each specimen was placed on two smear slides. One slide was stained by the ziehl-neelsen (ZN) method to be read by conventional microscopy (CM). The other slide was stained and scanned by MTSS. All specimens were decontaminated with 4% NaOH, and then inoculated into solid culture. The performance of MTSS was assessed. MTSS produced higher average positivity rate (27.96%) as compared with the CM (26.83%). The overall sensitivity and specificity of MTSS were 78.9% and 93.9%, respectively. The sensitivity and specificity of CM was 77.4% and 95.0%, respectively. MTSS exhibited a favorable performance in the detection of AFB. It may be an alternative to CM for screening TB.