Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2017 May:143:159-169.
doi: 10.1016/j.cmpb.2017.03.010. Epub 2017 Mar 11.

Antibiogramj: A tool for analysing images from disk diffusion tests

C A Alonso  1 , C Domínguez  2 , J Heras  3 , E Mata  2 , V Pascual  2 , C Torres  1 , M Zarazaga  1
Affiliations

Antibiogramj: A tool for analysing images from disk diffusion tests

C A Alonso et al. Comput Methods Programs Biomed. 2017 May.

Abstract

Background and objectives: Disk diffusion testing, known as antibiogram, is widely applied in microbiology to determine the antimicrobial susceptibility of microorganisms. The measurement of the diameter of the zone of growth inhibition of microorganisms around the antimicrobial disks in the antibiogram is frequently performed manually by specialists using a ruler. This is a time-consuming and error-prone task that might be simplified using automated or semi-automated inhibition zone readers. However, most readers are usually expensive instruments with embedded software that require significant changes in laboratory design and workflow.

Methods: Based on the workflow employed by specialists to determine the antimicrobial susceptibility of microorganisms, we have designed a software tool that, from images of disk diffusion tests, semi-automatises the process. Standard computer vision techniques are employed to achieve such an automatisation.

Results: We present AntibiogramJ, a user-friendly and open-source software tool to semi-automatically determine, measure and categorise inhibition zones of images from disk diffusion tests. AntibiogramJ is implemented in Java and deals with images captured with any device that incorporates a camera, including digital cameras and mobile phones. The fully automatic procedure of AntibiogramJ for measuring inhibition zones achieves an overall agreement of 87% with an expert microbiologist; moreover, AntibiogramJ includes features to easily detect when the automatic reading is not correct and fix it manually to obtain the correct result.

Conclusions: AntibiogramJ is a user-friendly, platform-independent, open-source, and free tool that, up to the best of our knowledge, is the most complete software tool for antibiogram analysis without requiring any investment in new equipment or changes in the laboratory.

Keywords: Antibiograms; Disk diffusion test; ImageJ; Inhibition zone reader; Learning system; OpenCV.

PubMed Disclaimer

Substances