Evaluation of the performance of two real-time PCR assays for detecting Mycobacterium species.

The sensitivities of PCR assays in our study might be overestimated, because this study enrolled relatively lower number of PCR-negative samples which potentially missed PCR-negative but culture-positive specimens. However, the two real-time PCR assays for detecting MTB and NTM perform equally well in relative performance evaluation and their Cq values can be considered suitable for predicting smear-positive specimens.