Semi-automatic detection of the evolutionary forms of visceral leishmaniasis in microscopic blood smears
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Fecha
2019
Autores
Salazar, J
Vera, M
Huérfano, Y
Vera, M I
Gelvez-Almeida, E
Valbuena, O
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Editor
IOP Publishing
Resumen
Leishmaniasis is a complex group of diseases caused by obligate unicellular and
intracellular eukaryotic protozoa of the leishmania genus. Leishmania species generate diverse
syndromes ranging from skin ulcers of spontaneous resolution to fatal visceral disease. These
syndromes belong to three categories: visceral leishmaniasis, cutaneous leishmaniasis and
mucosal leishmaniasis. The visceral leishmaniasis is based on the reticuloendothelial system
producing hepatomegaly, splenomegaly and lymphadenopathy. In the present article, a semiautomatic
segmentation strategy is proposed to obtain the segmentations of the evolutionary
shapes of visceral leishmaniasis called parasites, specifically of the type amastigote and
promastigote. For this purpose, the optical microscopy images containing said evolutionary
shapes, which are generated from a blood smear, are subjected to a process of transformation
of the color intensity space into a space of intensity in gray levels that facilitate their
subsequent preprocessing and adaptation. In the preprocessing stage, smoothing filters and
edge detectors are used to enhance the optical microscopy images. In a complementary way, a
segmentation technique that groups the pixels corresponding to each one of the parasites,
presents in the considered images, is applied. The results reveal a high correspondence between
the available manual segmentations and the semi-automatic segmentations which are useful for
the characterization of the parasites. The obtained segmentations let us to calculate areas and
perimeters associated with the parasites segmented. These results are very important in clinical
context where both the area and perimeter calculated are vital for monitoring the development
of visceral leishmaniasis.