Recognition of Molecular Structure of Phosphonium Salts from the Visual Appearance of Material with Deep Learning Can Reveal Subtle Homologs

Determining molecular structures is foundational in chemistry and biology. The notion of discerning molecular structures simply from the visual appearance of a material remained almost unthinkable until the advent of machine learning. This paper introduces a pioneering approach bridging the visual appearance of materials (both at the micro- and nanostructural levels) with traditional chemical structure analysis methods. Quaternary phosphonium salts are opted as the model compounds, given their significant roles in diverse chemical and medicinal fields and their ability to form homologs with only minute intermolecular variances. This research results in the successful creation of a neural network model capable of recognizing molecular structures from visual electron microscopy images of the material. The performance of the model is evaluated and related to the chemical nature of the studied chemicals. Additionally, unsupervised domain transfer is tested as a method to use the resulting model on optical microscopy images, as well as test models trained on optical images directly. The robustness of the method is further tested using a complex system of phosphonium salt mixtures. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this study offers the first evidence of the feasibility of discerning nearly indistinguishable molecular structures.