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Recognition of protozoan parasites from microscopic images: Eimeria species in chickens and rabbits as a case study

Automated diagnosis and identification of diseases and conditions such as parasites from microscopic images have been mainly carried out by utilizing the object morphological characteristics. The extraction of morphometric features needs the use of highly complex techniques that require computational power. Therefore, in order to reduce this complexity, this paper presents an automated identification based on analyzing three groups of pixel-based feature sets: column features (CF), row features (RF), and the third one (CRF) obtained by merging CF and RF together. For the classification task, K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) have been applied. The classification results have been evaluated by adapting a 5-fold cross validation. Additionally, a robust sub-set of the features has been selected by Relieff feature selection method to prevent overfitting, which in turn has improved the final results. Two microscopic image slide databases of a type of protozoan parasites genus called Eimeria in fowls and rabbits have been examined in order to assess the robustness of the proposed methods. The highest accuracy rates obtained when the entire features were used are 85.55% (±0.39%) and 96.6% (±0.82%) from grey-scale level and color images, respectively. These results have been increased by 5% when the feature size is reduced by two thirds when Relieff was utilized. The feature sets have yielded highly accurate results and are expected to make the automatic identification simpler than the analysis of morphological features.