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Updated: Mar 16, 2026
Remote Laboratory Management: Respiratory Virus Diagnostics
Published on: April 6, 2019
Drone Transport of Microbes in Blood and Sputum Laboratory Specimens
Timothy K Amukele1, Jeff Street2, Karen Carroll2
1Department of Pathology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA tamukele@jhmi.edu.
Abstract:
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) could potentially be used to transport microbiological specimens. To examine the impact of UAVs on microbiological specimens, blood and sputum culture specimens were seeded with usual pathogens and flown in a UAV for 30 ± 2 min. Times to recovery, colony counts, morphologies, and matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization-time of flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS)-based identifications of the flown and stationary specimens were similar for all microbes studied.
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