Region-based segmentation of parasites for high-throughput screening

  • Authors:
  • Asher Moody-Davis;Laurent Mennillo;Rahul Singh

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA;Universite De La Mediterranee Aux-Marseille II, Marseille, France;Department of Computer Science, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA

  • Venue:
  • ISVC'11 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Advances in visual computing - Volume Part I
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

This paper proposes a novel method for segmenting microscope images of schisotsomiasis. Schistosomiasis is a parasitic disease with a global impact second only to malaria. Automated analysis of the parasite's reaction to drug therapy enables high-throughput drug discovery. These reactions take the form of phenotypic changes that are currently evaluated manually via a researcher viewing the video and assigning phenotypes. The proposed method is capable of handling the unique challenges of this task including the complex set of morphological, appearance-based, motion-based, and behavioral changes of parasites caused by putative drug therapy. This approach adapts a region-based segmentation algorithm designed to quickly identify the background of an image. This modified implementation along with morphological post-processing provides accurate and efficient segmentation results. The results of this algorithm improve the correctness of automated phenotyping and provide promise for high-throughput drug screening.