Interactive/automated method to count bacterial colonies
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abstract
The growth and maintenance of bacteria on agar plates (Petri dishes) has long
been a common practice in microbiology. The number of colonies in a culture is usually
counted manually to calculate the concentration of bacteria, however, this process is
time-consuming, tedious and error prone. Most automated counting systems, existing
on the literature, perform adequately when the colonies are well spaced, large, circular
in shape and with good contrast from the background. When these assumptions are
violated, most automated colony analysis systems can rapidly lose reliability, accuracy
and utility. To address the above problems, the goal of this study is to design and implement
a cost-effective, software-centred system that accepts general digital camera images
as its input, for detecting as well as enumerating bacterial colonies in a fully automatic
manner. An interactive semi-automatic system is also proposed to overcome any
error from fully automatic system. The two systems (automated and interactive) combine
thresholding, median filter and morphological operations to segment the colonies
on a Petri dish image. The next step consists in separating the individual colonies from
the clustered colonies. Then, the units colonies are counted. To separate and count
the clustered colonies, the automatic system uses a watershed transformation and the
interactive system uses the clicks of the user. The proposed systems are capable to
reduce the manpower and time required for counting colonies while producing correct
colony counting.
The number of colonies in a culture is counted to calculate the concentration of
bacteria in the original broth; however, manual counting can be tedious, timeconsuming
and imprecise. Automation of colony counting has been of increasing
interest for many decades, and these methods have been shown to be more
consistent than manual counting. Significant limitations of many algorithms used
in automated systems are their inability to recognize overlapping colonies as
distinct and to count colonies on the plate boundary. This study proposes an
interactive semi-automated counting system and a fully automated counting
system using image processing methods which overcomes these problems. The
proposed systems are capable to reduce the manpower and time required for
counting colonies while taking account colonies both around the central area and
boundary areas of a Petri dish. The results obtained are compared with other
methods found in the literature.
This study proposes an interactive counting system and a fully automated counting system using image processing methods which are capable to reduce the manpower and time required for counting colonies
while taking account colonies both around the central area and boundary areas of a Petri dish.
This study proposes an interactive counting system and a fully automated counting system using image processing methods which are capable to reduce the manpower and time required for counting colonies while taking account colonies both around the central area and boundary areas of a Petri dish.
