[Diagnosing fungal infections: trends and new developments]

Diagnosing fungal infections remains a problem, particularly in the immunocompromised patient. Symptoms are mostly non-specific and colonization is difficult to distinguish from invasive disease. Existing diagnostic tools often lack sensitivity. Thus, the combination of various diagnostic tools is mandatory to allow earlier diagnosis of systemic fungal infections. Microscopy, culture based methods, antigen detection and molecular techniques such as PCR may help to facilitate and accelerate the diagnosis. Sensitive and specific PCR assays to detect fungal DNA are an important part of the diagnostic approach. But extensive validation and standardization is strongly needed before PCR assays can be used in a routine laboratory.