用对抗域适应提升显微镜AI识别食源性细菌的泛化能力

Rapid detection of foodborne bacteria is critical for food safety and quality, yet traditional culture-based methods require extended incubation and specialized sample preparation. This study addresses these challenges by i) enhancing the generalizability of AI-enabled microscopy for bacterial classification using adversarial domain adaptation and ii) comparing the performance of single-target and multi-domain adaptation. Three Gram-positive (Bacillus coagulans, Bacillus subtilis, Listeria innocua) and three Gram-negative (E. coli, Salmonella Enteritidis, Salmonella Typhimurium) strains were classified. EfficientNetV2 served as the backbone architecture, leveraging fine-grained feature extraction for small targets. Few-shot learning enabled scalability, with domain-adversarial neural networks (DANNs) addressing single domains and multi-DANNs (MDANNs) generalizing across all target domains. The model was trained on source domain data collected under controlled conditions (phase contrast microscopy, 60x magnification, 3-h bacterial incubation) and evaluated on target domains with variations in microscopy modality (brightfield, BF), magnification (20x), and extended incubation to compensate for lower resolution (20x-5h). DANNs improved target domain classification accuracy by up to 54.45% (20x), 43.44% (20x-5h), and 31.67% (BF), with minimal source domain degradation (<4.44%). MDANNs achieved superior performance in the BF domain and substantial gains in the 20x domain. Grad-CAM and t-SNE visualizations validated the model's ability to learn domain-invariant features across diverse conditions. This study presents a scalable and adaptable framework for bacterial classification, reducing reliance on extensive sample preparation and enabling application in decentralized and resource-limited environments.