Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) Improves Classification Accuracy of Bacterial Raman Spectral Data Enabling Portable Diagnostics

Antimicrobial resistance is expected to claim 10 million lives per year by 2050, and resource-limited regions are most affected. Raman spectroscopy is a novel pathogen diagnostic approach promising rapid and portable antibiotic resistance testing within a few hours, compared to days when using gold standard methods. However, current algorithms for Raman spectra analysis 1) are unable to generalize well on limited datasets across diverse patient populations and 2) require increased complexity due to the necessity of non-trivial pre-processing steps, such as feature extraction, which are essential to mitigate the low-quality nature of Raman spectral data. In this work, we address these limitations using Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) to enhance model generalization across a diverse array of hyperparameters in clinical bacterial isolate classification tasks. We demonstrate that SAM achieves accuracy improvements of up to 10.7% on a single split, and an increase in average accuracy of 2.5% across all splits in spectral classification tasks over a traditional optimizer, Adam. These results display the capability of SAM to advance the clinical application of AI-powered Raman spectroscopy tools.