New AI Driven Colony Counter ‘Iris’
Meet our new colony counter: ‘Iris’! This newly developed colony counter is automated based on artificial intelligence. The Iris counts colonies grown in petri dishes or petrifolds of different sizes.
Process of our colony counter
Our colony count is based on artificial intelligence (Deep Neural Network). It is completely designed, created, programmed and built ‘in house’ at AAA Lab Service B.V. on the Veenderveld in Roelofarendsveen. Counting bacterial colonies on microbiological culture plates is a time-consuming, error-prone but fundamental task in microbiology. Computer vision-based approaches will increase the consistency, efficiency and reliability of the process, but accurate counting by traditional computer vision is challenging, due to the high degree of variability of agglomerated colonies. Artificial intelligence will help increase results in an important way.
Traditional computer vision versus artificial intelligence
Traditional programming is how current colony counters generally count, programming via shape and colour recognition. Easy-to-count colonies can perform reasonably well, but a large proportion of colonies are less easy or impossible to count resulting in a satisfactory count. Colony counting based on artificial intelligence (AI) works differently. The Iris AI colony counter takes pictures after which a trained neural network will do the counting for you. No programming involved, but annotation instead. Correct annotation ‘lets’ the system see which colonies the neural network should count. The more pictures placed in the Artificial Intelligence Network, the better the system will perform.
Validating results
Iris AI camera results are validated by an analyst using a very user-friendly user interface dedicated to the Iris software, which runs via a web application on workstation(s). Artificial intelligence allows you to count almost anything in a Petri dish, send us a picture of the objects you want to analyse and we can give you our expert opinion. Different colonies in a petri dish, different types of colonies, different sizes, if you can tell the difference, artificial intelligence should be able to do the same. The type of data exchange to your LIMS can be discussed, FTP server data to LIMS (XML and images) is a good possibility and we have the ability to create other possibilities as well.
Want to know more?
For technical or user interface questions, we can connect to the AI camera Iris to help you via remote access. If you want to know more about this new development please contact us!
