A Novel Approach for Testing Water Safety Using Deep Learning Inference of Microscopic Images of Unincubated Water Samples

Fecal-contaminated water causes diseases and even death. Current microbial water safety tests require pathogen incubation, taking 24-72 hours and costing 20-50 per test. This paper presents a solution (DeepScope) exceeding UNICEF's ideal Target Product Profile requirements for presence/absence testing, with an estimated per-test cost of 0.44. By eliminating the need for pathogen incubation, DeepScope reduces testing time by over 98%. In DeepScope, a dataset of microscope images of bacteria and water samples was assembled. An innovative augmentation technique, generating up to 21 trillion images from a single microscope image, was developed. Four convolutional neural network models were developed using transfer learning and regularization techniques, then evaluated on a field-test dataset comprising 100,000 microscope images of unseen, real-world water samples collected from fourteen different water sources across Sammamish, WA. Precision-recall analysis showed the DeepScope model achieves 93% accuracy, with precision of 90% and recall exceeding 94%. The DeepScope model was deployed on a web server, and mobile applications for Android and iOS were developed, enabling Internet-based or smartphone-based water safety testing, with results obtained in seconds.