System and method of organism identification

A method of identifying microorganisms, the method comprising:

• culturing a sample of material on a substrate to form a colony of microorganisms;
• scanning a region of the substrate to determine a centroid position of the colony;
• adjusting a relative orientation of a coherent light beam and the colony such that a centroid of the coherent light beam substantially coincides with the centroid position of the colony;
• obtaining image data of the colony illuminated by the coherent light beam;
• analyzing the image data;
• and
• categorizing the analyzed image data to identify a type of the colony.

A computer program product stored or distributed on a non-transient computer readable medium, including instructions causing a computer to:

• control a scanner to scan a region of the substrate to determine a centroid position of a colony of microorganisms cultured thereon;
• adjust a relative orientation of a coherent light beam and the colony such that a centroid of a coherent light beam substantially coincides with the centroid position of the colony
• acquire image data of the colony from an imaging device;
• characterize the image data to produce a feature vector of the image data;
• and
• categorize the image data using the feature vector and process that has been trained by using feature vectors previously obtained from colonies of a known genotype.

A computer program product stored or distributed on a non-transient computer readable medium, including instructions causing a computer to:

• control a scanner to scan a region of the substrate to determine a centroid position of a colony of microorganisms cultured thereon;
• adjust a relative orientation of a coherent light beam and the colony such that a centroid of a coherent light beam substantially coincides with the centroid position of the colony;
• acquire image data of the colony from an imaging device;
• characterize the image data to produce feature vectors of the image data;
• and
• train a characterization process using by using feature vectors obtained from colonies of a known genotype.

A method of screening material samples, the method comprising:

• culturing a material sample on a substrate;
• scanning the substrate to determine a centroid position of a colony of the cultured material sample;
• adjusting a position of a centroid of a coherent light beam so that a centroid of the coherent light beam is substantially coincident with the centroid position of the colony;
• obtaining image data for the colony;
• extracting a feature vector from the image data;
• and
• categorizing the colony based on the feature vector.