Design of a Method for Prediction of Susceptibility to Antimicrobials

The results from the in vitro susceptibility tests are usually available only for a limited set of antibiotics. This paper provides a practical method for prediction of a posteriori probability for coverage for all relevant antibiotics. The method combines susceptibility results for a limited set of antibiotics with data on cross-resistance between antibiotics. The Brier distance was used to measure the accuracy of the predicted coverages. Across all pathogen/antibiotic combinations in the derivation database, the Brier distances for a priori coverages was 39%, reduced to 25% for predicted a posteriori coverages, indicating that there is a significant advantage to the method proposed (p<10 −99).