TY - JOUR
T1 - Automated counting of bacterial colonies by image analysis
AU - Chiang, Pei Ju
AU - Tseng, Min Jen
AU - He, Zong Sian
AU - Li, Chia Hsun
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 Elsevier B.V.
Copyright:
Copyright 2014 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2015/1/1
Y1 - 2015/1/1
N2 - Research on microorganisms often involves culturing as a means to determine the survival and proliferation of bacteria. The number of colonies in a culture is counted to calculate the concentration of bacteria in the original broth; however, manual counting can be time-consuming and imprecise. To save time and prevent inconsistencies, this study proposes a fully automated counting system using image processing methods. To accurately estimate the number of viable bacteria in a known volume of suspension, colonies distributing over the whole surface area of a plate, including the central and rim areas of a Petri dish are taken into account. The performance of the proposed system is compared with verified manual counts, as well as with two freely available counting software programs. Comparisons show that the proposed system is an effective method with excellent accuracy with mean value of absolute percentage error of 3.37%. A user-friendly graphical user interface is also developed and freely available for download, providing researchers in biomedicine with a more convenient instrument for the enumeration of bacterial colonies.
AB - Research on microorganisms often involves culturing as a means to determine the survival and proliferation of bacteria. The number of colonies in a culture is counted to calculate the concentration of bacteria in the original broth; however, manual counting can be time-consuming and imprecise. To save time and prevent inconsistencies, this study proposes a fully automated counting system using image processing methods. To accurately estimate the number of viable bacteria in a known volume of suspension, colonies distributing over the whole surface area of a plate, including the central and rim areas of a Petri dish are taken into account. The performance of the proposed system is compared with verified manual counts, as well as with two freely available counting software programs. Comparisons show that the proposed system is an effective method with excellent accuracy with mean value of absolute percentage error of 3.37%. A user-friendly graphical user interface is also developed and freely available for download, providing researchers in biomedicine with a more convenient instrument for the enumeration of bacterial colonies.
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U2 - 10.1016/j.mimet.2014.11.009
DO - 10.1016/j.mimet.2014.11.009
M3 - Article
C2 - 25451456
AN - SCOPUS:84916879386
SN - 0167-7012
VL - 108
SP - 74
EP - 82
JO - Journal of Microbiological Methods
JF - Journal of Microbiological Methods
ER -