會議議程

Executive Summary：
Yee-Chun Chen is Director of National Institute of Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology, National Health Research Institutes since August, 2024. She is Professor of Medicine at the National Taiwan University Hospital and College of Medicine in Taipei, Taiwan. She serves as a consultant or committee member at the Ministry of Health and Welfare, CDC, TFDA, and Taipei City Government. She currently co-chairs a national antimicrobial stewardship and infection prevention and control program sponsored by Taiwan CDC.
Professor Chen started her clinical service as attending physician in 1992 at the National Taiwan University Hospital, and currently serves as a professorial lecturer in various clinical infectious diseases, infection control, emerging infectious diseases such as SARS, pH1N1 and COVID-19, infectious diseases in immunocompromised hosts, antimicrobial (including antifungal) stewardship, pathogenesis of sepsis, travel medicine and medical informatics at the National Taiwan University College of Medicine.
She is one of the nation's leaders in infection prevention and control, adult vaccination, and medical mycology. Prof Chen’s research focus includes infection control and hospital epidemiology, antibiotic stewardship and antibiotic resistance, medical informatics, clinical and molecular mycology including one health perspective of drug-resistant Aspergillus and Candida infection. She is PI or co-PI of a series of multicenter, clinical and molecular epidemiological studies of infectious diseases in Taiwan as well in Asia. Her dedication to medical research has resulted in more than 350 peer-reviewed journal articles. She is listed in the top 2% scientist in world ranking 2020.

Lecture Abstract：
Diagnosing central nervous system (CNS) infections remains challenging due to the broad and diverse pathogens, limited cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) volume, and the low sensitivity of conventional microbiological testing (CMT). This 20-min presentation will provide update information regarding clinical implementation of metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) for unbiased pathogen detection in suspected CNS infections including data based on a two-year prospective multicenter study across seven hospitals in Taiwan. Overall, mNGS demonstrated higher sensitivity and broader pathogen detection than CMT. Among various CMTs, molecular diagnostic assays provide a fairly cost-effective and rapid means to diagnose the most common selected etiologies. However, current nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) testing is utilized based on clinical reasoning and targets a single agent, or a limited number of pathogens such as multiplexed PCR testing using syndromic panels. While mNGS provides unbiased and objective detection and taxonomic characterization of all nucleic acids present in a sample, enabling analysis of the entire microbiome, as well as the human host genome or transcriptome in a patient sample. The capacity to detect both expected and unexpected potential pathogens (bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites) and those difficult-to-culture etiologies in a sample and simultaneously interrogate host responses has great potential utility in the diagnosis of infectious disease. However, obstacles and barriers of clinical implementation of mNGS for infectious disease diagnostics remain. Standard protocols, bioinformatics pipelines, reference databases, contamination risks, inconsistent diagnostic thresholds as well as clinical utility warrant further investigation. Nevertheless, the latter is applied for all nucleic acid testing, either by PCR or mNGS. Detection of nucleic acid does not by itself prove that an identified microorganism is the cause of the illness, and findings have to be interpreted in the clinical context while integrating stringent control to prevent contamination from sample collection at bedside to sequencing in the laboratory.

Executive Summary：
Dr. Lee is currently the Director of Deaprtment of Medical Imaging, NTU Cancer Center and Chief of Interventrional Radiology, Department of Medical Imaging, NTU Hospital. His work focuses on neuroimaging of stroke and interventional procedures, including neurovascular and others.

Lecture Abstract：
As treatment options increasing in recent years, timely diagnosis by multi-modality images is essential for accurate and emergent treatment. The common imaging pitfalls in acute stroke patients will be presented.