Machine Learning Techniques for Effective Pathogen Detection Based on Resonant Biosensors

We describe a machine learning (ML) approach to processing the signals collected from a COVID-19 optical-based detector. Multilayer perceptron (MLP) and support vector machine (SVM) were used to process both the raw data and the feature engineering data, and high performance for the qualitative detection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus with concentration down to 1 TCID₅₀/mL was achieved. Valid detection experiments contained 486 negative and 108 positive samples, and control experiments, in which biosensors without antibody functionalization were used to detect SARS-CoV-2, contained 36 negative samples and 732 positive samples. The data distribution patterns of the valid and control detection dataset, based on T-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE), were used to study the distinguishability between positive and negative samples and explain the ML prediction performance. This work demonstrates that ML can be a generalized effective approach to process the signals and the datasets of biosensors dependent on resonant modes as biosensing mechanism.