Detection of Small Events in Environmental Monitoring Culture Media

October 12, 2021

Environmental monitoring trend analysis relies on the accuracy of the results recovered on all Petri dishes used in the critical production environments. Standardized results are difficult to achieve due to the natural human variation in sight and evaluation. The huge variety of microorganisms morphology can make correct detection difficult and providing a correct enumeration in some cases is a real challenge. This is illustrated by numerous FDA 483 forms issued between 2011 and 2018 due to bad practices during Petri dish inspection. For this reason, we developed a specific methodology to standardize and measure the quality of detection.