A semi-automatic system for schistosome eggs detection

Schistosomiasis is a parasitic infection affecting, actually, more than 200 millions persons in the developing countries. The parasite multiplication and transmission are very fast and constitute a heavy burden on the public health and medical services. The parasite is characterized by eggs in the urine (Haematobium), which are photographed under the microscope light. The specialist must visually examine the immense amounts of information, and proceeds to count the total eggs number which determines the disease gravity. This operation is time-consuming and gives rise to a great counting error when manually scanning the microscopic preparation. This paper presents an image processing technique for schistosome eggs detection and counting, as well as an intermidiate system based on a microcomputer interfaced to the microscope stage controller which allows the automatic scanning of the entire microscopic preparation and the creation of an information file to the affected persons.