Both MALDI and PCR are great for identifying organisms, but they...

Both MALDI and PCR are great for identifying organisms, but they are less great at quantifying the number of organisms in a sample, or telling you much about their antibiotic susceptibilities (which is what the treating Dr really wants to know).

For those reasons we won't be moving away from the old culture methods anytime soon.

I do see APAS as part of an automated workflow though, where the AI identifies significant colonies on a culture plate and a robotic arm picks the colonies to inoculate them for MALDI ID and automated antibiotic susceptibility testing.