Evaluation of growth characteristics of Aspergillus parasiticus inoculated in different culture media by shortwave infrared (SWIR) hyperspectral imaging

Abstract

The growth characteristics of Aspergillus parasiticus incubated on two culture media were examined using shortwave infrared (SWIR, 1000–2500nm) hyperspectral imaging (HSI) in this work. HSI images of the A. parasiticus colonies growing on rose bengal medium (RBM) and maize agar medium (MAM) were recorded daily for 6 days. The growth phases of A. parasiticus were indicated through the pixel number and average spectra of colonies. On score plot of the first principal component (PC1) and PC2, four growth zones with varying mycelium densities were identified. Eight characteristic wavelengths (1095, 1145, 1195, 1279, 1442, 1655, 1834 and 1929nm) were selected from PC1 loading, average spectra of each colony as well as each growth zone. Furthermore, support vector machine (SVM) classifier based on the eight wavelengths was built, and the classification accuracies for the four zones (from outer to inner zones) on the colonies on RBM were 99.77%, 99.35%, 99.75% and 99.60% and 99.77%, 99.39%, 99.31% and 98.22% for colonies on MAM. In addition, a new score plot of PC2 and PC3 was used to differentiate the colonies incubated on RBM and MAM for 6 days. Then characteristic wavelengths of 1067, 1195, 1279, 1369, 1459, 1694, 1834 and 1929nm were selected from the loading of PC2 and PC3. Based on them, a new SVM model was developed to differentiate colonies on RBM and MAM with accuracy of 100.00% and 99.99%, respectively. In conclusion, SWIR hyperspectral image is a powerful tool for evaluation of growth characteristics of A. parasiticus incubated in different culture media.

Keywords

• Aspergillus parasiticus
• growth characteristics
• characteristic wavelengths
• shortwave infrared (SWIR) hyperspectral imaging