Multicenter Clinical Evaluation of the Automated Aries Assay.

Molecular methods offer superior sensitivity and specificity and reduce testing turnaround time from days to hours for detection of and In this study, we evaluated the performance of the automated PCR-based Aries Assay, which detects both and directly from nasopharyngeal swab specimens. The limits of detection (LoDs) were 1,800 CFU·ml for and 213 CFU·ml for The assay detected 16/18 unique / strains. Of 71 potentially cross-reacting organisms, 5 generated false positives in 1/6 replicates; none of 6 additional spp.