Convolutional Neural Networks for Chagas' Parasite Detection in Histopathological Images

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2021 Nov:2021:2732-2735. doi: 10.1109/EMBC46164.2021.9629563.

Abstract

Chagas disease is a widely spreaded illness caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi (T. cruzi). Most cases go unnoticed until the accumulated myocardial damage affect the patient. The endomyocardium biopsy is a tool to evaluate sustained myocardial damage, but analyzing histopathological images takes a lot of time and its prone to human error, given its subjective nature. The following work presents a deep learning method to detect T. cruzi amastigotes on histopathological images taken from a endomyocardium biopsy during an experimental murine model. A U-Net convolutional neural network architecture was implemented and trained from the ground up. An accuracy of 99.19% and Jaccard index of 49.43% were achieved. The obtained results suggest that the proposed approach can be useful for amastigotes detection in histopathological images.Clinical relevance- The proposed method can be incorporated as automatic detection tool of amastigotes nests, it can be useful for the Chagas disease analysis and diagnosis.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Chagas Disease* / diagnosis
  • Humans
  • Mice
  • Myocardium
  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Parasites*
  • Trypanosoma cruzi*