Background: Colony morphology (size, color, edge, elevation, and texture), as observed on culture media, can be used to visually discriminate different microorganisms. Methods: This work introduces a hybrid method that combines standard pre-trained CNN keras models and classical machine-learning models for supporting colonies discrimination, developed in Petri-plates. In order to test and validate the system, images of three bacterial species (Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Staphylococcus aureus) cultured in Petri plates were used. Results: The system demonstrated the following Accuracy discrimination rates between pairs of study groups: 92% for Pseudomonas aeruginosa vs. Staphylococcus aureus, 91% for Escherichia coli vs. Staphylococcus aureus and 84% Escherichia coli vs. Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Conclusions: These results show that combining deep-learning models with classical machine-learning models can help to discriminate bacteria colonies with good accuracy ratios.

Since the beginning of 2020, Coronavirus Disease 19 (COVID-19) has attracted the attention of the World Health Organization (WHO). This paper looks into the infection mechanism, patient symptoms, and laboratory diagnosis, followed by an extensive assessment of different technologies and computerized models (based on Electrocardiographic signals (ECG), Voice, and X-ray techniques) proposed as a diagnostic tool for the accurate detection of COVID-19. The found papers showed high accuracy rate results, ranging between 85.70% and 100%, and F1-Scores from 89.52% to 100%. With this state-of-the-art, we concluded that the models proposed for the detection of COVID-19 already have significant results, but the area still has room for improvement, given the vast symptomatology and the better comprehension of individuals’ evolution of the disease.