A New Few-Shot Learning Method of Digital PCR Image Detection

With the global pandemic of infectious diseases, the demand for accurate nucleic acid detection is daily increasing. The traditional threshold-based algorithms are adopted as the mainstream for processing the images of digital polymerase chain reaction (dPCR) now, but they are facing huge challenges on complex problems such as irregular noise, uneven illumination, and the lack of data. So, this paper proposed a novel few-shot learning method based on our improved YOLOv3 model with fast processing speed and high accuracy to deal with complicated situations. Besides, to reduce the requirement of the large training dataset and annotation time of deep neural networks, we proposed the Random Background Transfer Method (RBTM) and Source Traceability Annotation Method (STAM) as the data augmentation and annotation method separately, which exploit the prior knowledge of the data and successfully realized the few-shot learning. Bases on the domain knowledge of dPCR images, our method could effectively augment images and reduce the labeling time by 70% while retaining the visually prominent features and improves the detection accuracy from 63.96% of the traditional threshold-based algorithm to as high as 98.98%. With the optimal processing speed and accuracy, our method is the state-of-art strategy for the detection of dPCR images now.