Linkou Chang Gung Memorial Hospital has unveiled a new way to identify MRSA, a classification of deadly bacteria that is resistant to medicine and difficult to treat.
Staphylococcus aureus is a deadly bacterium that infects millions of people worldwide each year. “MRSA” is a particularly dangerous strand of this bacterium, due to its resistance to antibiotics.
Linkou Chang Gung Memorial Hospital announced that they’ve found a way to predict cases of Staphylococcus aureus infection that might contain the MRSA strain. Doctors say that they used AI technology and big data to determine whether a patient has been infected with the superbug. It has an accuracy of 80%, and will allow doctors to make more accurate decisions when administering treatments. That’s important because if doctors use antibiotics that are too strong when treating infections, it may lead to more strains of medicine-resistant bacterium.
Doctors say they hope the new method can be approved quickly and use it to build a database to combat superbugs.