Detection of microfilariae in peripheral blood smears using image analysis

Abstract

Lymphatic filariasis is a leading cause of permanent disability in many countries. Due to its asymptomatic and epidemiological characteristics, the whole population living in threatened areas needs to be screened. The popular diagnostic method involves the manual microscopic observation of nocturnal blood smears in order to detect the presence of microfilariae. Due its strenuous and mundane nature, considerable detection errors are observed. This paper presents an image-based technique for diagnosis of filariasis through the detection of microfilariae present in Giemsa or Hematoxylin and Eosin stained peripheral thick blood smears. The proposed method uses connected component analysis and dynamic thresholding to detect microfilariae in images acquired from the microscope eyepiece. A sensitivity of 91.42% and a specificity of 88.57% were observed on experiments conducted on a database of 70 images.