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. 2023 Oct 13:14:1283235.
doi: 10.3389/fpls.2023.1283235. eCollection 2023.

Deep learning for plant bioinformatics: an explainable gradient-based approach for disease detection

Affiliations

Deep learning for plant bioinformatics: an explainable gradient-based approach for disease detection

Muhammad Shoaib et al. Front Plant Sci. .

Abstract

Emerging in the realm of bioinformatics, plant bioinformatics integrates computational and statistical methods to study plant genomes, transcriptomes, and proteomes. With the introduction of high-throughput sequencing technologies and other omics data, the demand for automated methods to analyze and interpret these data has increased. We propose a novel explainable gradient-based approach EG-CNN model for both omics data and hyperspectral images to predict the type of attack on plants in this study. We gathered gene expression, metabolite, and hyperspectral image data from plants afflicted with four prevalent diseases: powdery mildew, rust, leaf spot, and blight. Our proposed EG-CNN model employs a combination of these omics data to learn crucial plant disease detection characteristics. We trained our model with multiple hyperparameters, such as the learning rate, number of hidden layers, and dropout rate, and attained a test set accuracy of 95.5%. We also conducted a sensitivity analysis to determine the model's resistance to hyperparameter variations. Our analysis revealed that our model exhibited a notable degree of resilience in the face of these variations, resulting in only marginal changes in performance. Furthermore, we conducted a comparative examination of the time efficiency of our EG-CNN model in relation to baseline models, including SVM, Random Forest, and Logistic Regression. Although our model necessitates additional time for training and validation due to its intricate architecture, it demonstrates a faster testing time per sample, offering potential advantages in real-world scenarios where speed is paramount. To gain insights into the internal representations of our EG-CNN model, we employed saliency maps for a qualitative analysis. This visualization approach allowed us to ascertain that our model effectively captures crucial aspects of plant disease, encompassing alterations in gene expression, metabolite levels, and spectral discrepancies within plant tissues. Leveraging omics data and hyperspectral images, this study underscores the potential of deep learning methods in the realm of plant disease detection. The proposed EG-CNN model exhibited impressive accuracy and displayed a remarkable degree of insensitivity to hyperparameter variations, which holds promise for future plant bioinformatics applications.

Keywords: Omics data; deep learning; hyperspectral imaging; plant bioinformatics; plant disease detection.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Provides examples from our dataset, illustrating different types of plant diseases. The images showcase: (A) Powdery mildew, (B) Rust, (C) Leaf spot, and (D) Blight.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Displays hyperspectral images representing four prevalent types of plant diseases.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Proposed EG-CNN model for the detection of plant disease using the image and omics data.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Saliency maps for plant disease diagnosis.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Activation maximization for plant disease diagnosis.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Proposed model training and validation accuracy and loss.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Performance comparison of proposed EG-CNN with baseline machine learning classification models.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Comparison of Training, Validation, and Testing Time for Proposed and Baseline Machine Learning Models.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Sample images and corresponding saliency maps for the EG-CNN model.
Figure 10
Figure 10
ROC Curve with AUC score for the proposed EG-CNN and baseline models.

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Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This publication is based upon work supported by the Khalifa University of Science and Technology under Award No. RC1-2018-KUCARS. This work was also supported in part by RIF of Zayed University, United Arab Emirates, under Grant 23009.

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