A New Strategy for the Morphological and Colorimetric Recognition of Erythrocytes for the Diagnosis of Forms of Anemia based on Microscopic Color Images of Blood Smears

The detection of red blood cells based on morphology and colorimetric appearance is very important in improving hematology diagnostics. There are automatons capable of detecting certain forms, but these have limitations with regard to the formal identification of red blood cells because they consider certain cells to be red blood cells when they are not and vice versa. Other automata have limitations in their operation because they do not cover a sufficient area of the blood smear. In spite of their performance, biologists have very often resorted to the manual analysis of blood smears under an optical microscope for a morphological and colorimetric study. In this paper, we present a new strategy for semi-automatic identification of red blood cells based on their isolation, their automatic color segmentation using Otsu's algorithm and their morphology. The algorithms of our method have been implemented in the programming environment of the scientific software MATLAB resulting in an artificial intelligence application. The application, once launched, allows the biologist to select a region of interest containing the erythrocyte to be characterized, then a set of attributes are computed extracted from this target red blood cell. These attributes include compactness, perimeter, area, morphology, white and red proportions of the erythrocyte, etc. The types of anemia treated in this work concern the iron-deficiency, sickle-cell or falciform, thalassemia, hemolytic, etc. forms. The results obtained are excellent because they highlight different forms of anemia contracted in a patient.Comment: ISIS

Students’ Proficiency and Challenges in Filipino-to-English Translation: The Case of Filipino Senior High School Students in a Private Institutio

Translation has been considered an important linguistic skill for ESL students and is used as a remedy to repair linguistic barriers. This study is interested in exploring the proficiency and challenges encountered by Filipino students in Filipino-to-English translation. A class of twenty-seven (27) senior high school students in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) strand participated in this study. Employing sequential explanatory design, the researchers first administered a Filipino-to-English translation proficiency test, followed by a content analysis of their translations. Quantitative data showed that participants’ quality of translations was evaluated as poor, which is attributable to their lack mastery of both Filipino and English. This encapsulates their difficulty in achieving equivalency. Qualitative analyses revealed that the students encountered lexical-semantic, cultural, pragmatic, and grammatical challenges in translating. In particular, translation errors were mostly in grammar, specifically in pluralization, capitalization, inflections, tenses, subject-verb agreement, demonstrative pronoun use, and fragments. This study emphasizes the importance of effective language teaching practices especially in the Philippines where students are expected to possess proficiency in Filipino (the national language) and English, both official languages of the countr