Segmentation of dense and multi-species bacterial colonies using models trained on synthetic microscopy images

The spread of microbial infections is governed by the self-organization of bacteria on surfaces. Bacterial interactions in clinically relevant settings remain challenging to quantify, especially in systems with multiple species or varied material properties. Quantitative image analysis methods based on machine learning show promise to overcome this challenge and support the development of novel antimicrobial treatments, but are limited by a lack of high-quality training data. Here, novel experimental and image analysis techniques for high-fidelity single-cell segmentation of bacterial colonies are developed. Machine learning-based segmentation models are trained solely using synthetic microscopy images that are processed to look realistic using a state-of-the-art image-to-image translation method (cycleGAN), requiring no biophysical modeling. Accurate single-cell segmentation is achieved for densely packed single-species colonies and multi-species colonies of common pathogenic bacteria, even under suboptimal imaging conditions and for both brightfield and confocal laser scanning microscopy. The resulting data provide quantitative insights into the self-organization of bacteria on soft surfaces. Thanks to their high adaptability and relatively simple implementation, these methods promise to greatly facilitate quantitative descriptions of bacterial infections in varied environments, and may be used for the development of rapid diagnostic tools in clinical settings.