Dr. Bill Harper’s Struggle Counting Colonies

Dr. Harper is creating new compounds to combat antibiotic resistance. For each new drug he creates, he adds his new compounds onto petri dishes of bacteria to see how they affect microbial growth .

Unfortunately, his manual process is slow, error-prone, and yields inconsistent results, making it difficult to track the progress of experiments and compare data over time. Worse yet, he was writing all of his results down on pen/paper notebooks!

After his lab received a NIH grant to scale his research, these inefficiencies became problematic when testing multiple antibiotic compounds simultaneously. He tried hiring a laboratory technician to help manage the growing volume of petri dishes, but maintaining accurate paper records became a challenge.

This manual approach also caused delays in the lab, as Dr. Harper had to spend hours counting colonies under the microscope instead of synthesizing new compounds for future tests.

To solve the problem, Dr. Harper tried using digital counters, but these devices couldn’t tell the difference between multiple species on the same plates, leaving him searching for a more effective solution.

Dr. Harper discovered Labtools.AI, simple-to-use software for scientists to train custom machine learning models on scientific data without code. After capturing 100 images into Labtools.AI, he had his lab technician annotate the images and train a machine learning model to count colonies. After training his custom model, Dr. Harper could automatically analyze each image he uploaded, creating audit trails and making counting more reproducible!

Thanks to Labtools.AI, Dr. Harper’s lab now runs smoother, with accurate counting in under a second instead of spending 7 minutes per plate—helping them save money, and freeing up his lab to get back to discovering the next big breakthrough!

What are you waiting for?

Stop manually analyzing data and try Labtools.AI today!

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