Abstract: Much progress has been made on the clinical diagnosis of tuberculosis (TB) in recent one year by series studies. In bacteriological diagnosis, novel sputum-smear techniques such as mobile digital fluorescence microscopy can clearly show and save the images of bacteria, light-emitting diode (LED) fluorescence microscopy (FM) can greatly shorten the time of detection and increase the detection rate compared with conventional acid-fast staining methods. Particular studies had been made on the difficulties of TB diagnosis in radiology, for example, the clinical stages of lung cancer with pulmonary TB (PTB) and differential diagnosis of multidrug-resistant PTB and nontuberculosis mycobacterium (NTM). IGRAs (interferon gamma release assay) have great advantage in diagnosis of latent TB infection. Its diagnosis value has been further re-evaluated in this year. Rapid development was obtained in molecular biological diagnosis of TB, the value of Xpert Mtb/RIF has been further evaluated; hyperbranched rolling circle amplification (HRCA) for direct detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis proved to be simple, economic and fast, which has wide prospect of application in resource limited areas. In interventional diagnosis of TB, the combination of several techniques such as bronchoscopy, endoscope, molecular biology, ultrasonic guided technique, bacteriology and pathology made great progress in the diagnosis of TB, for example, the bronchial washing liquid from TB patients through bronchoscope was detected by Xpert Mtb/RIF. The development of molecular pathological diagnosis on TB is outstanding. Gene detection of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in the biopsy tissue remarkably increased the TB detection.

Key words: Tuberculosis/diagnosis, Bacteriological techniques, Diagnostic imaging, Interferon-gamma release tests, Nucleic acid amplification techniques, Biological markers, Microbial sensitivity tests