A Review on Bacterial Identification from Light Microscopy Images Using Few-Shot Learning with Prototypical Networks

Accurate identification of pathogenic bacteria from images taken under light microscopy is an important role in clinical diagnosis and microbiology. Traditional deep learning methods such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have achieved excellent performance but are based on enormous, well-annotated datasets that may not be readily available. Absence of labeled images of bacteria is one of the key challenges in real-world applications, where class imbalance and diversity of samples affect generalization. Recent years have witnessed few-shot learning being a potential paradigm for mitigating data paucity by enabling models to learn well from sparse samples. Among numerous few-shot approaches, prototypical networks have proven useful for image classification with sparse data. This paper overviews the progress in bacterial identification from light microscopy images, reviews existing classical and deep learning methods, and highlights how prototypical networks solve the shortcomings of conventional models through few-shot learning. The review concludes with open problems and future directions, including integrating fewshot learning into web-based, scalable diagnostic platforms for efficient pathogen detection.