Events - Actualities - Microbiology

Presented as a world preview at the Forum Labo trade show in Paris, France, Scan 3000 Ai was awarded the 2025 Innovation Awards in the Scientific Instrumentation category.

Boosted by artificial intelligence, Scan Ai offers unrivaled performance and continuous development opportunities at the cutting edge of technological developments.

Our customers are the best judges!

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A real time saver! The Scan 3000 Ai allows us to obtain results in a few seconds with exceptional precision.

Mickaël LAGACHE
Operational Excellence Manager
Merville, France

Mérieux Nutrisciences

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The scalability of the Scan Ai changes everything for us, as we have a varied and constantly evolving analytical and matrix environment.

Philippe FIGWER, Ph.D.
Director ACTALIA Control and Quality
Villers Bocage, France

Actalia

Scan Ai

Scan Ai colony counter in brief:

•Increased accuracy: + 25% compared to a standard counter
•Discrimination of artifacts: labels on the bottom of the plate, air bubbles, condensation on the lid, particles, writing, laser marking, etc.
•Classification and counting of bacteria, yeasts and molds
•Fast processing: 400 plates per hour
•Continuous improvement of counting performance
•You remain in control thanks to locked-AI: updates at your convenience

Scan Ai is part of the Interscience Scan range of automatic colony counters.

They allow a fast, complete and accurate reading of your Petri dishes. Colony counting is no longer time-consuming.

Interscience’s R&D department has been developing AI since 2019.

Our teams have compiled more than a million annotated images to offer you powerful colony counting software coupled with an ultra-precise counter.

2025 Innovation Awards - Scan 3000 Ai - Forum Labo - Paris - France
Forum Labo - Presentation of the 2025 Innovation Awards

Scan Ai - Emmanuel Jalenques - Forum Labo

INTERVIEW

Emmanuel Jalenques, co-CEO of Interscience, tells us about the genesis of Scan Ai, an automatic AI colony counter, entirely designed, developed and manufactured in France by Interscience.

How did the creation and development of Scan Ai come about?

Emmanuel Jalenques: In 2019, Interscience R&D engineers began work on the use of CNNs applied to colony counting. Our production since 2006 of automatic colony counters with conventional algorithms provided a good knowledge of customers’ use cases.

The subsequent development of the ScanStation, a real-time incubation and colony counting station, in 2017 made it possible to automatically generate approximately 1 million correctly annotated Petri dish images. We therefore had a solid and very varied database of analyses and plates.

Did you collaborate with other research units for this development with AI?

EJ: In 2021, Interscience has formed several partnerships with university image processing laboratories, as well as with engineering schools, to accelerate the theoretical development of AI applied to microbiology.

At the same time, a user test campaign was carried out at several Interscience customers, including Merieux Nutriscience in Merville, one of the world’s largest service laboratories, to test and validate performance in real-life use cases.

What strategy have you chosen for the use of artificial intelligence applied to the laboratory?

EJ: In 2025, Interscience launched the Scan 3000 Ai and 5000 Ai, enabling the use of CNN neural networks locally on its customers’ PCs, without the need for an internet connection. The software is optimized to be able to count a plate in less than a second, with the use of a PC.

This allows for complete data security, as service laboratories often do not wish to send their customers’ analysis results to the cloud, where they have no guarantee of data security.

Why did you choose to lock the AI?

EJ: The fact that the neural networks are fixed also allows the pharmaceutical sector to validate the software, as the counting performance remains the same over time.

Nevertheless, if the customer so wishes, frequent updates allow them to benefit from the rapid advances in algorithm performance.

Continuous improvement and security with locked IA

Happy to have won the Innovation Trophies with Scan Ai?

EJ: Yes, because it is the culmination of years of development for the R&D, Applications and Sales teams. More than a million images of plates have been compiled and the project has mobilized new, young development teams.

We won the Innovation Awards in 2017 with ScanStation and now hundreds of them are in laboratories all over the world, including the largest industrial groups in home care and the cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries. The Innovation Awards support us in our development and are a pleasure for all the teams!

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