Antimicrobial susceptibility testing is the laboratory process used to determine whether a bacterium is sensitive, intermediate, or resistant to a specific antibiotic. Labs perform AST with standardized methods and interpret the result against clinical breakpoints, so the outcome is a reference for targeted treatment rather than a guess.
In cyber security terms, AST matters because its results often flow through electronic health records, laboratory systems, and decision-support software. If those data feeds are delayed, altered, mislabeled, or unavailable, clinicians may choose the wrong empiric therapy or miss a resistance pattern. That makes integrity, availability, access control, and audit logging important around the AST pipeline. Defenders also watch for model drift and data-quality problems when AST feeds are used in predictive tools, and they still rely on the lab result as the ground truth for validation.