Evaluation of Performance of An Aspergillus PCR in Tissue and Pleural Effusion Samples of Immunocompromised Patients

Although being a frequent and lethal complication in patients (pts) with hematologic malignancies, diagnosing invasive aspergillosis (IA) still remains a difficult issue as culture-based methods show low sensitivity especially under the current clinical practice of antifungal prophylaxis or rapid antifungal therapy. In certain clinical settings, performing biopsies for identification of the underlying infectious organism becomes important. However, as culture-based methods only yield results in a minority of patients, using non-culture-based methods like Aspergillus specific polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for detection of IA directly in clinical specimens is becoming increasingly important and might help to characterize the causative pathogen.

Therefore the performance of an established Aspergillus-specific nested PCR in biopsies, re-section material or pleural effusions is evaluated.