A report on Tuberculosis in Monkeys (Macaca mulatta): A case study at Chittagong Zoo

Simian tuberculosis is one of the most important bacterial diseases of captive monkey in Bangladesh. A prevalence study to characterize Mycobacterium infecting tuberculous monkeys in captive managemental systems in Chittagong Zoo was carried out. In the present study, 14 rhesus monkeys which were newly arrived in the zoo and kept in the quarantine were used for the tuberculin skin testing (TST) to determine the prevalence of tuberculosis. An overall of 28.57% (4/14) was recorded by the TST. There were also marked differences in the prevalence of the disease within different age groups. In the tested positive animals, one was died within two days and showed tubercle in the lung and other organs in the post-mortem examination. The lung sample was collected for Zeihl-Neelsen revealed red colored tubercule bacilli.The above examination confirmed that, the macaques were suffering from tuberculosis

The Big Data Obstacle of Lifelogging

Living in the digital age has resulted in a data rich society where the ability to log every moment of our lives is now possible. This chronicle is known as a human digital memory and is a heterogeneous record of our lives, which grows alongside its human counterpart. Managing a lifetime of data results in these sets of big data growing to enormous proportions; as these records increase in size the problem of effectively managing them becomes more difficult. This paper explores the challenges of searching such big data sets of human digital memory data and posits a new approach that treats the searching of human digital memory data as a machine learning problem

Guest Editorial Special Issue on: Big Data Analytics in Intelligent Systems

The amount of information that is being created, every day, is quickly growing. As such, it is now more common than ever to deal with extremely large datasets. As systems develop and become more intelligent and adaptive, analysing their behaviour is a challenge. The heterogeneity, volume and speed of data generation are increasing rapidly. This is further exacerbated by the use of wireless networks, sensors, smartphones and the Internet. Such systems are capable of generating a phenomenal amount of information and the need to analyse their behaviour, to detect security anomalies or predict future demands for example, is becoming harder. Furthermore, securing such systems is a challenge. As threats evolve, so should security measures develop and adopt increasingly intelligent security techniques. Adaptive systems must be employed and existing methods built upon to provide well-structured defence in depth. Despite the clear need to develop effective protection methods, the task is a difficult one, as there are significant weaknesses in the existing security currently in place. Consequently, this special issue of the Journal of Computer Sciences and Applications discusses big data analytics in intelligent systems. The specific topics of discussion include the Internet of Things, Web Services, Cloud Computing, Security and Interconnected Systems

Tuberculosis bacteria detection and counting in fluorescence microscopy images using a multi-stage deep learning pipeline

The manual observation of sputum smears by fluorescence microscopy for the diagnosis and treatment monitoring of patients with tuberculosis (TB) is a laborious and subjective task. In this work, we introduce an automatic pipeline which employs a novel deep learning-based approach to rapidly detect Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) organisms in sputum samples and thus quantify the burden of the disease. Fluorescence microscopy images are used as input in a series of networks, which ultimately produces a final count of present bacteria more quickly and consistently than manual analysis by healthcare workers. The pipeline consists of four stages: annotation by cycle-consistent generative adversarial networks (GANs), extraction of salient image patches, classification of the extracted patches, and finally, regression to yield the final bacteria count. We empirically evaluate the individual stages of the pipeline as well as perform a unified evaluation on previously unseen data that were given ground-truth labels by an experienced microscopist. We show that with no human intervention, the pipeline can provide the bacterial count for a sample of images with an error of less than 5%.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Automated methods for tuberculosis detection/diagnosis : a literature review

Funding: Welcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support fund of the University of St Andrews, grant code 204821/Z/16/Z.Tuberculosis (TB) is one of the leading infectious causes of death worldwide. The effective management and public health control of this disease depends on early detection and careful treatment monitoring. For many years, the microscopy-based analysis of sputum smears has been the most common method to detect and quantify Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) bacteria. Nonetheless, this form of analysis is a challenging procedure since sputum examination can only be reliably performed by trained personnel with rigorous quality control systems in place. Additionally, it is affected by subjective judgement. Furthermore, although fluorescence-based sample staining methods have made the procedure easier in recent years, the microscopic examination of sputum is a time-consuming operation. Over the past two decades, attempts have been made to automate this practice. Most approaches have focused on establishing an automated method of diagnosis, while others have centred on measuring the bacterial load or detecting and localising Mtb cells for further research on the phenotypic characteristics of their morphology. The literature has incorporated machine learning (ML) and computer vision approaches as part of the methodology to achieve these goals. In this review, we first gathered publicly available TB sputum smear microscopy image sets and analysed the disparities in these datasets. Thereafter, we analysed the most common evaluation metrics used to assess the efficacy of each method in its particular field. Finally, we generated comprehensive summaries of prior work on ML and deep learning (DL) methods for automated TB detection, including a review of their limitations.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Microscopio automatizado: conteo de bacilos de tuberculosis

La prueba baciloscópica de la tuberculosis es la forma de diagnóstico microscópico más utilizado para combatir la enfermedad en los países pobres o subdesarrollados debido a su bajo costo y rapidez. Sin embargo, la realización de esta prueba es un proceso tedioso, extenuante y requiere de un especialista debidamente capacitado. Por ello, en el presente trabajo se presenta un algoritmo automatizado para la detección y conteo de bacilos de tuberculosis presentes en imágenes de muestras de esputo mediante la utilización de técnicas de procesamiento de imágenes digitales. Se analizaron diferentes espacios de color para hallar aquella capa o canal de color que posea un mayor contraste entre las intensidades de color de los píxeles de los bacilos y del fondo. Para esto se hizo un análisis de los histogramas mediante las gráficas de las características operativas del receptor. Para la segmentación de los bacilos, el presente trabajo desarrolló una técnica de umbralización adaptativa utilizando el método de Otsu para hallar el óptimo valor umbral. Luego, los objetos detectados son clasificados como bacilos o no-bacilos mediante un árbol de clasificación utilizando características de área y excentricidad. El algoritmo desarrollado presenta niveles de sensibilidad, especificidad y exactitud mayores a 90% y tiene un tiempo de ejecución de aproximadamente 9 segundos por campo (15 minutos para 100 campos). Cabe resaltar que, a diferencia de investigaciones previas, la presente tesis buscó desarrollar un algoritmo tanto de segmentación de los bacilos, como de su clasificación, e implementarlo en un microscopio automatizado para el diagnóstico automático de la enfermedad en tiempo real. Con esta finalidad, se implementó el algoritmo desarrollado con el programa Matlab® en un lenguaje de programación C++, obteniendo un programa capaz de interactuar con otros programas como el del control de la cámara digital. Se espera que este trabajo sirva de base para próximos estudios orientados a automatizar el proceso de diagnóstico de la enfermedad de una manera más óptima y veloz.Tesi

Expert System with an Embedded Imaging Module for Diagnosing Lung Diseases

Lung diseases are one of the major causes of suffering and death in the world. Improved survival rate could be obtained if the diseases can be detected at its early stage. Specialist doctors with the expertise and experience to interpret medical images and diagnose complex lung diseases are scarce. In this work, a rule-based expert system with an embedded imaging module is developed to assist the general physicians in hospitals and clinics to diagnose lung diseases whenever the services of specialist doctors are not available. The rule-based expert system contains a large knowledge base of data from various categories such as patient's personal and medical history, clinical symptoms, clinical test results and radiological information. An imaging module is integrated into the expert system for the enhancement of chest X-Ray images. The goal of this module is to enhance the chest X-Ray images so that it can provide details similar to more expensive methods such as MRl and CT scan. A new algorithm which is a modified morphological grayscale top hat transform is introduced to increase the visibility of lung nodules in chest X-Rays. Fuzzy inference technique is used to predict the probability of malignancy of the nodules. The output generated by the expert system was compared with the diagnosis made by the specialist doctors. The system is able to produce results\ud which are similar to the diagnosis made by the doctors and is acceptable by clinical standards