Cultryx: Precision Diagnostic Stewardship for Blood Cultures Using Machine Learning

The 2024 blood culture bottle shortage brought diagnostic resource allocation to the forefront, reflecting persistent, foundational challenges with low-value testing and empiric treatment approaches under clinical uncertainty.

To determine whether a machine learning approach using electronic medical record data can predict bacteremia more effectively than existing systems and practices to guide diagnostic testing and empiric treatment strategies.

In a retrospective cohort of 101,812 adult emergency department encounters (2015-2025), we first established an idealized cognitive baseline by evaluating physician and generative AI (GPT-5) application of the professional society-endorsed Fabre framework on a validation subset. We then trained an XGBoost model (Cultryx) on the full cohort to predict bacteremia, benchmarking its performance against real-world clinical heuristics (SIRS, Shapiro Rule).

For the idealized baseline, physicians applying the Fabre framework achieved 95.7% sensitivity, but GPT-5 automation failed to replicate this standard (71.6% sensitivity). In real-world benchmarking, Cultryx outperformed all clinical heuristics (AUROC 0.810). SIRS lacked specificity (41.2%), driving diagnostic overuse, while the Shapiro Rule lacked sensitivity (70.2%), missing ~30% of bacteremia cases. In contrast, when calibrated to a strict 95% sensitivity target, Cultryx achieved the highest culture volume deferral rate (26.2%, deferring ~15,872 bottles with predicted negative results) while maintaining a 98.9% negative predictive value. Cultryx^score, a simplified bedside tool, retained a 20.8% deferral rate.

Machine learning provides a superior, data-driven alternative to mainstream clinical heuristics for predicting bacteremia. By maximizing culture deferment without compromising pathogen detection, Cultryx can conserve diagnostic resources, reduce unnecessary empiric antibiotic exposure, and systematically elevate patient safety.