Dual-input deep learning system for microbial identification from blood agar plates

OBJECTIVE: The morphological classification of microbial cultures and colonies requires specialized knowledge and experience; therefore, automation in this field remains limited. This study examines the feasibility of automating the identification of pathogenic microbial species from colony images of cultured microorganisms. METHODS: Two distinct image datasets were constructed for 10 clinically relevant species: a colony image dataset, consisting of individual colony images cropped, and a tile image dataset, generated by dividing entire images of the culture plate into tiles. Separate ResNet-50-based models were trained in each dataset, and their outputs were integrated to evaluate the classification performance. Training was conducted using 10,048 colony images and 23,003 tile images collected from 418 strains, and performance was assessed with five-fold cross-validation (K = 5). RESULTS: The colony image model achieved a sensitivity of 0.934 and a specificity of 0.993, while the tile image model achieved a sensitivity of 0.918 and a specificity of 0.991. Integration of the two models into an ensemble model further improved performance, yielding a sensitivity of 0.955 and a specificity of 0.995 when tested on 76 independent strains. CONCLUSION: The ensemble model approach provides high accuracy and robustness, suggesting its potential technical contributions to microbial identification in clinical microbiology laboratories.