Antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST)

Antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) is a laboratory process that determines how effective specific antibiotics or antimicrobial agents are against bacteria or fungi. When a patient has an infection, doctors need to know which medication will best fight the harmful microbes. In AST, samples from the infection are exposed to various drugs to see which ones successfully inhibit growth. This helps guide the choice of treatment, ensuring patients receive the most appropriate therapy, improving outcomes and reducing the risk of resistance, where infections become harder to treat due to overuse of ineffective antibiotics.