Morphology-Guided Deep Learning for Nanoparticle Agglomeration Diagnostic Assays

Abstract

Affordable, accurate, and rapid point-of-care diagnostic tests remain elusive due to inherent trade-offs between performance and cost. Conventional nucleic acid tests offer high sensitivity but require complex, expensive steps such as amplification and purification, whereas lateral flow assays are simple and low-cost but lack the necessary sensitivity for many applications. To bridge this gap, we present a miniaturized and simplified chip-based platform that combines three components into a single diagnostic pipeline: we use (i) spectrally distinct silver and gold nanoparticles that form analyte-dependent clusters with unique spectral fingerprints, (ii) a one-pot, enzyme- and purification-free assay on a chip integrated with a high-throughput automated low-cost microscope, and (iii) a morphology-guided convolutional Graph Neural Network that embeds morphology information into convolutional kernels and performs graph-based relational learning across particle-level features. This integration captures spectral, spatial, and morphological quantification at the particle level, rather than relying on bulk spectral shifts, thereby overcoming the limitations of contemporary nanoparticle assays and image-level deep learning approaches. Processing up to 5000 particles per image using only <5 GB GPU memory, Mc-GNN achieves femtomolar sensitivity with 98.2% recall for synthetic DNA and 94.8% for SARS-CoV-2 RNA from whole virus, despite variations in nanoparticle selection and sample complexity. By embedding morphological information into the biosensing pipeline, our diagnostic platform is computationally efficient, smartphone-compatible and is readily extensible to new analytes and multiplexing, offering a scalable solution for a fieldable diagnostic tool.