Detection and localization of microbial colonies by means of deep learning algorithms

Due to massive expansion of the mass spectrometry and constant price growth of the human labour the optimalisation of the microbial samples preparation comes into question. This master thesis deals with design and implementation of a machine learning algorithm for segmentation of images of microbial colonies cultivated on Petri dishes. This algorithm is going to be a part of a controlling software of a MBT Pathfinder device developed by the company Bruker s. r. o. that automates the process of smearing microbial colonies onto a MALDI target plates. In terms of this thesis a several models of neural networks based on the UNet, UNet++ and ENet architecture were implemented. Based on a number of experiments investigating various configurations of the networks and pre-processing of the training datatset there was chosen an ENet model with quadruplet filter count and additional convolutional block of the encoder trained on a dataset pre-processed with round mask