The rapid identification of bacterial pathogens in clinical
samples
like blood, urine, pus, and sputum is the need of the hour. Conventional
bacterial identification methods like culturing and nucleic acid-based
amplification have limitations like poor sensitivity, high cost, slow
turnaround time, etc. Raman spectroscopy, a label-free and noninvasive
technique, has overcome these drawbacks by providing rapid biochemical
signatures from a single bacterium. Raman spectroscopy combined with
chemometric methods has been used effectively to identify pathogens.
However, a robust approach is needed to utilize Raman features for
accurate classification while dealing with complex data sets such
as spectra obtained from clinical isolates, showing high sample-to-sample
heterogeneity. In this study, we have used Raman spectroscopy-based
identification of pathogens from clinical isolates using a deep transfer
learning approach at the single-cell level resolution. We have used
the data-augmentation method to increase the volume of spectra needed
for deep-learning analysis. Our ResNet model could specifically extract
the spectral features of eight different pathogenic bacterial species
with a 99.99% classification accuracy. The robustness of our model
was validated on a set of blinded data sets, a mix of cultured and
noncultured bacterial isolates of various origins and types. Our proposed
ResNet model efficiently identified the pathogens from the blinded
data set with high accuracy, providing a robust and rapid bacterial
identification platform for clinical microbiology.