Automated Nanoparticle Image Processing Pipeline for AI-Driven Materials Characterization

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Abstract
Recent innovations have made it possible to produce millions of distinct nanoparticles on a chip. These vast volumes of data are impossible to analyze manually, necessitating the development of automated tools. In previous work, we created a binary classification machine learning model to select quality nanoparticle images for downstream analysis. In this work, we show that adding a custom image preprocessing step before model training can produce significantly higher-performing models in a fraction of the time and make the model more robust to different image noise levels and microscope acquisition settings. The proposed image processing pipeline effectively cleans raw nanoparticle images, enhances key features, and allows us to use much lower resolution images and simpler neural network model architectures, resulting in higher performance and significant cost savings. Experiments demonstrate superior performance relative to our baseline, including a 15% improvement in recall and more than a 10% increase in accuracy. Given the high cost of downstream analysis, it is critical to minimize false positives in our application, and our best-performing model obtains a precision of 97.3% and weighted F-score of 95.9% on an unseen test set. Additionally, model training time is reduced from 15.5 hours to 32 seconds. We expect that adopting this pipeline for AI-driven automated nanoparticle characterization will offer a considerable speedup in the laboratory, allowing researchers to rapidly and accurately analyze much greater volumes of data and accelerate materials discovery.
Funding Information
  • United States Department of Defense Army Research Office (W911NF-23-1-0141)
  • Northwestern University Center for Nanocombinatorics
  • International Institute for Nanotechnology, Northwestern University
  • National Science Foundation (DGE-2234667, OAC-2331329, CMMI-2053929, DMR-2308691, ECCS-2025633)
  • Toyota Research Institute
  • Keck Foundation
  • State of Illinois
  • United States Department of Energy (DE-SC0021399)
  • National Institute of Standards and Technology (70NANB19H005)
  • Sherman Fairchild Foundation

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