Abstract: Objective  To evaluate the value of simultaneous amplification and testing（SAT）in diagnosis of patients with pulmonary tuberculosis.  Methods Sputum smear, culture with species identification, and TB-SAT were studied in 172 patients with suspected pulmonary tuberculosis. The samples, which had inconsistent results between culture and SAT, should be rechecked with fluorescent quantitative PCR（FQ-PCR).  Results 156 patients were clinically diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. If taking the culture plus FQ-PCR as the gold standard, the sensitivity and specificity of TB-SAT were 97.8%（89/91）and 97.5%（79/81）,respectively. However, the sensitivity and specificity of TB-SAT were 58.3% （91/156）and 100.0%（16/16）with the clinical diagnosis as standard. The positive rates of TB-SAT were 84.9%（79/93） for sputum positive patients and 19.0%（12/63） for sputum negative patients.  Conclusion  TB-SAT is an effective method for diagnosis of patients with pulmonary tuberculosis.

Key words: Tuberculosis, pulmonary/diagnosis, Nucleic acid amplification techniques, Molecular diagnostic techniques