Clinical Value of Metagenomic Sequencing in Neonatal Sepsis

Infectious diseases remain leading causes of mortality and morbidity in children. Rapid and accurate diagnosis of infectious diseases in children is important for developing an effective treatment and management strategy. However, the current diagnosis of infectious agents mainly depends on culture and molecular testing. Both of the methods either has long turnaround times or narrow detection range. Metagenome next generation sequencing (mNGS) has been applied to the diagnosis of central nervous system infection, lower respiratory tract infection and sepsis, which showed high positive rate, short turnaround time. As a multi-center prospective observational clinical study, the study intends to enroll 2000 suspected neonatal sepsis cases from multiple centers. Culture, classical PCR and mNGS were performed simultaneously. This study is one of the few multi-center studies in China to evaluate the value of mNGS in the diagnosis and treatment of neonatal sepsis, and will provide representative data for the distribution characteristics of pathogen spectrum of children in the real world and the clinical diagnosis and treatment value of mNGS.