Objective: Each hour of delay in antibiotics administration increases mortality in sepsis. The aim of this study was to decrease the bacteria identification time to initiate appropriate antibiotic treatment as early as possible.

Method: Tests were applied to 39 Gram negative bacteria isolated from blood cultures sent to our laboratory from intensive care units between November 2015- February 2016. The results of bacterial identification tested on both microarray and LFM methods were compared.

Results: In the comparison of MALDI-TOF MS after sub-culture, MALDI-TOF after lysis centrifugation and microarray methods, sensitivity was determined as 82% (32/39) in LFM and as 87.1% (34/39) in the microarray method. All three methods had a concordance of 76.9% (30/39). Most common species identified in this study were Acinetobacter spp., Klebsiella spp. and Escherichia spp., and their Cohen’s Kappa coefficients for LFM and post-subculture MALDI were calculated as 0.715, 0.843, and 0.938, respectively. In addition, their BC-GN microarray and post-subculture MALDI concordance rates calculated with Cohen’s Kappa were 0.935, 0.753 and 0.938, respectively. Both methods showed good correlations with the post-culture MALDI method.

Conclusion: Lysis centrifugation and microarray platforms decrease the identification time in blood culture processing successfully. Results of this study suggest that for the laboratories with MALDI-TOF mass spectrophotometer, the lysis filtration method is a fast and cost-effective method that may be suitable for routine procedures.