Bacteria Colony Enumeration and Classification for Clonogenic Assay

Abstract

Bacteria colony classification and enumeration is an essential step in clonogenic assay, which is often performed manually in many clinical research laboratories. It is known to be time consuming and labor intensive, but also error-prone since the manual counting tends to have more subjective interpretation and largely relies on persistent practice, especially when a large amount of colonies exist in the plate. In this demonstration, we introduce a fully automatic counter for bacteria colony enumeration and classification. The proposed counter accepts digital camera images as its input and performs colony enumeration and classification based on image mining. The proposed counter shows a robust performance in terms of both precision and recall, and is efficient in terms of labor- and time-savings.