Gravitational Effect on Swarming Behavior of Microorganisms

• Duration: Sep 2024 - Aug 2025
• Role: Research Assistant
• Advisor: Prof. Zijie Qu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University)

Project Overview

This project investigated the swarming behavior of microorganisms under different gravitational conditions, requiring robust tracking and segmentation of colony boundaries.

Key Contributions

• Trained a U-Net model for colony boundary segmentation.
• After diagnosing systematic failure modes in the initial approach, I adopted and integrated a Segment Anything Model (SAM) based pipeline.
• The transition to the SAM-based approach successfully achieved reliable automated detection, completely replacing the need for manual annotation.