RamanNet: a lightweight convolutional neural network for bacterial identification based on Raman spectra

Raman spectroscopy combined convolutional neural network (CNN) enables rapid and accurate identification of the species of bacteria. However, the existing CNN requires a complex hyperparameters model design. Herein, we propose a new simple network architecture with less hyperparameter design and low computation cost, RamanNet, for rapid and accurate identifying of bacteria at the species level based on its Raman spectra. We verified that compared with the previous CNN methods, the RamanNet reached comparable results on the Bacteria-ID Raman spectral dataset and PKU-bacterial Raman spectral datasets, but using only about 1/45 and 1/297 network parameters, respectively. RamanNet achieved an average isolate-level accuracy of 84.7 ± 0.3%, antibiotic treatment identification accuracy of 97.1 ± 0.3%, and distinguished accuracy of 81.6 ± 0.9% for methicillin-resistant and -susceptible Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA and MSSA) on the Bacteria-ID dataset, respectively. Moreover, it achieved an average accuracy of 96.04% on the PKU-bacterial dataset. The RamanNet model benefited from fewer model parameters that can be quickly trained even using CPU. Therefore, our method has the potential to rapidly and accurately identify bacterial species based on their Raman spectra and can be easily extended to other classification tasks based on Raman spectra.