Automatic annotation of Leishmania infections in fluorescence microscopy images

Abstract

Leishmania is a unicellular parasite that infects mammals. Biologists are interested in determining the effect of drugs in Leishmania infections. This requires the manual annotation of the number of macrophages and parasites in images, in order to obtain the percentage of infection (PI), the average number of parasites per infected cell (NPI) and the infection index (IX). Considering that manual annotation is tedious, time-consuming and often erroneous, in this paper we propose an automatic method for automatic annotation of Leishmania infections using fluorescence microscopy. Moreover, when compared to related works, the proposed method is able to get superior performance under most perspectives. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.