Latest Posts
July 8, 2026
Critical Care · NGS in Pleural Fluid When Pleural Fluid Culture Falls Short. A 145-specimen ICU evaluation found targeted next-generation sequencing detected pathogens in exudative pleural fluid roughly three times more often than standard culture. Here is what the evidence shows, and where it fits. Source Lopez-Ruiz et al., AJRCCM 2026 (ATS 2026) Cohort AdventHealth ICU · n = 145 Topic Culture-negative pleural infection CLINICAL CONTEXT The Clinical Problem A patient in the ICU has a large pleural effusion. Imaging, inflammatory markers, and the clinical course all point toward infection. The pleural fluid is drained, sent for culture, and […]
June 4, 2026
Synovial NGS Concordance with ICM Criteria for PJI Diagnosis Periprosthetic joint infection (PJI) is one of the most consequential complications of hip and knee arthroplasty, and it is also one of the hardest to confirm. No single test settles the question on its own. The International Consensus Meeting 2018 (ICM-18) definition addresses this by combining major and minor criteria, yet major criteria such as two phenotypically matching positive cultures or a sinus tract communicating with the joint are not met in up to 29 percent of cases (Sigmund et al., 2022). Culture-negative PJI compounds the problem, occurring in roughly 28 […]
April 15, 2026
In Sequence: The Unseen Commitment to Quality at MicroGenDX When you receive your test results from MicroGenDX, you are seeing the final product of a comprehensive lab quality journey that began long before your sample arrived at our laboratory. What you don’t see are the countless hours of validation, the daily quality checks, the rigorous training programs, and the unwavering commitment to accuracy that happens behind our laboratory doors. Let’s pull back the curtain and show you what really goes on in our lab. The Foundation: Test Validation and Development Before any of our tests are approved for real world […]
March 30, 2026
Understanding the gap between clinical necessity and insurance coverage — and how your billing team can help close it. The Test Was Right. The Claim Was Denied. You ordered a molecular diagnostic test because culture alone wasn’t giving you the answer you needed. The clinical rationale was sound. The result informed your treatment plan. And then the claim came back denied. This scenario is more common than it should be — and it rarely has anything to do with whether the test was medically necessary. More often, the denial stems from a mismatch between how the encounter was documented and […]
March 4, 2026
A Paradigm Shift in Urology For much of modern medicine, a foundational assumption shaped the way clinicians approached urinary tract health: healthy urine is sterile. That assumption influenced how specimens were cultured, how infections were diagnosed, and how treatment decisions were made. It also meant that any bacterium detected in urine was presumed to be either a contaminant or a pathogen- with little consideration for a middle ground. Over the past decade, advances in molecular sequencing have dismantled this paradigm. Culture-independent techniques, particularly 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) gene sequencing, have revealed that the human urinary tract harbors a resident […]