Pathology|20 Feb 2023
How BioScout Works
What's in the box!? Find out more about BioScout technology and how we are improving disease management.
Edward Gubbins
6 Min ReadWhat's in the box!?
Well, if we told you that, we’d have to kill you…
...just kidding! While the concept behind BioScout's technology is pretty simple, streamlining the various engineering and science disciplines into a smooth automated process is rather complicated. That's why it has taken a lot of blood, sweat and tears to get the technology into the fine specimen it is today.
Firstly, we needed to upgrade traditional spore trapping to capture pathogens and particles constantly and efficiently while taking highly detailed microscopic imagery. We’ll get to the imagery later.
A small but powerful fan is responsible for drawing in air, in conjunction with various sensors and computers that regulate the amount of air inflow to maintain a constant draw of 10L per minute. The unit's large weathervane allows it to constantly face the wind, maximising its ability to collect anything flying around. Air is sucked in through a narrow nozzle; anything in the airstream, from fungal spores to pollen and even tiny insects, gets sucked in and adheres to a special transparent sticky tape.
After a carefully controlled sampling time, our custom robotic imaging system swings into action. It moves the tape like an old VCR to put the sample in front of an automated microscope. The microscope scans the tape, looking for anything interesting, and takes hundreds of high-resolution images with perfect focus. These images are sent back to our headquarters via the same cellular technology as a mobile phone (4G) with a much larger antenna.
Now comes another fun part.
Over the last four years, our very own Spore Squad has meticulously labelled individual spores within hundreds of thousands of microscopic images; this manual assessment from our highly experienced team is stored in a database. The vast dataset is then used to teach artificial learning models to automatically detect disease in near real-time. This means we can identify disease spores without human intervention whilst the spore squad monitors the system for extra quality assurance. Through machine learning, spore identification becomes quickly scalable across hundreds, or even thousands, of units. The possibilities are endless.
Spore numbers are taken daily and relayed to growers via our custom dashboard software in conjunction with standard weather data (temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind speed and direction). Customers can filter data based on individual units, target diseases and timeframes to help make informed decisions on disease management.
Spore numbers are taken daily and relayed to growers via our custom dashboard software in conjunction with standard weather data (temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind speed and direction). Customers can filter data based on individual units, target diseases and timeframes to help make informed decisions on disease management.
Next in the pipeline at BioScout is integrating this disease and weather data into a next-generation disease model and forecast, which will provide growers with an invaluable advantage compared to conventional weather-only-based disease models. These models will ultimately provide a comprehensive overview of a grower's disease risk at a given time, considering disease inoculum levels; this level of resolution into disease risk has not been available until now.
Get in touch with our team if you have questions about the technology or wish to join this exciting journey.
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