7-year performance of a clinical metagenomic next-generation sequencing test for diagnosis of central nervous system infections

Metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is an agnostic method for broad-based diagnosis of central nervous system infections (CNS). Here we analyzed the 7-year performance of clinical CSF mNGS testing of 4,828 samples from June 2016 to April 2023 performed by the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) clinical microbiology laboratory and extracted clinical and laboratory metadata from a subset of the samples (n=1,164) from 1,053 UCSF patients.