Automated Counting of Bacterial Colony Forming Units on Agar Plates

Silvio D Brugger, Christian Baumberger, Marcel Jost, Werner Jenni, Urs Brugger and Kathrin Mühlemann

PLOS ONE, 2012, vol. 7, issue 3, 1-6

Abstract: Manual counting of bacterial colony forming units (CFUs) on agar plates is laborious and error-prone. We therefore implemented a colony counting system with a novel segmentation algorithm to discriminate bacterial colonies from blood and other agar plates. A colony counter hardware was designed and a novel segmentation algorithm was written in MATLAB. In brief, pre-processing with Top-Hat-filtering to obtain a uniform background was followed by the segmentation step, during which the colony images were extracted from the blood agar and individual colonies were separated. A Bayes classifier was then applied to count the final number of bacterial colonies as some of the colonies could still be concatenated to form larger groups. To assess accuracy and performance of the colony counter, we tested automated colony counting of different agar plates with known CFU numbers of S. pneumoniae, P. aeruginosa and M. catarrhalis and showed excellent performance.

Date: 2012
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0033695 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 33695&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0033695

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0033695

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().