Abstract: An example system includes an image capture device configured to capture a sequence of images representative of a sample of microbial growth; and a processing unit having one or more processors, the one or more processors configured to pass the image data for the sequence of images through a machine learning model trained to generate one or more predicted future images of the microbial colony at a future time, the machine learning model trained using historical image data, the historical image data comprising a plurality of historical image data sets, each historical image data set of the historical image data sets comprising image data for a historical sequence of images of a corresponding historical microbial colony sample, wherein a prediction time interval between the future time and a capture time of a last image of the sequence of images is greater than each of the sampling time intervals.