Edge Artificial Intelligence (AI) for real-time automatic quantification of filariasis in mobile microscopy

by Lin Lin, Elena Dacal, Nuria D íez, Claudia Carmona, Alexandra Martin Ramirez, Lourdes Barón Argos, David Bermejo-Peláez, Carla Caballero, Daniel Cuadrado, Oscar Darias-Plasencia, Jaime García-Villena, Alexander Bakarjiev, Maria Postigo, Ethan Recalde-Jaramillo, Maria Flores-Chavez, Andrés Santos, María Jesús Ledesma-Carba yo, José M. Rubio, Miguel Luengo-Oroz Filariasis, a neglected tropical disease caused by roundworms, is a significant public health concern in many tropical countries. Microscopic examination of blood samples can detect and differentiate parasite species, but it is time consuming and requires expert microscopists, a resource that is not always available. In this context, artificial intelligence (AI) can assist in the diagnosis of this disease by automatically detecting and differentiating microfilariae. In line with the target product profile for lymphatic filariasis as defined by the World Health Organization, we developed an edge AI system running on a smartphone whose camera is aligned with the ocular of an optical microscope that detects and differentiates filarias species in real time without the internet connection. Our object detection algorithm that uses the Single-Shot Detection (SSD) MobileNet V2 detection model was developed with 115 cases, 85 cases with 1903 fields of view and 3342 labels for model training, and 30 cases with 484 fields of view and 873 labels for model validation before clinical validation, is able to detect microfila...
Source: PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases - Category: Tropical Medicine Authors: Source Type: research