Direct Identification of Bacteria in Blood Culture Samples Using an Electronic Nose

In this paper, we introduce a method for identification of bacteria in human blood culture samples using an electronic nose. The method uses features, which capture the static (steady state) and dynamic (transient) properties of the signal from the gas sensor array and proposes a means to ensemble results from consecutive samples. The underlying mechanism for ensembling is based on an estimation of posterior probability, which is extracted from a support vector machine classifier. A large dataset representing ten different bacteria cultures has been used to validate the presented methods. The results detail the performance of the proposed algorithm and show that through ensembling decisions on consecutive samples, significant reliability in classification accuracy can be achieved.