City Research Online

Abstract

Chagas disease, caused by Trypanosoma cruzi (T. cruzi), remains a significant public health challenge in Latin America. Traditional diagnostic methods relying on manual microscopy suffer from low sensitivity, subjective interpretation, and poor performance in suboptimal conditions. This study presents a novel computer vision framework integrating motion analysis with deep learning for automated T. cruzi detection in microscopic videos. Our motion-based detection pipeline leverages parasite motility as a key discriminative feature, employing frame differencing, morphological processing, and DBSCAN clustering across 23 microscopic videos. This approach effectively addresses limitations of static image analysis in challenging conditions including noisy backgrounds, uneven illumination, and low contrast. From motion-identified regions, 64×64 patches were extracted for classification. MobileNetV2 achieved superior performance with 99.63% accuracy, 100% precision, 99.12% recall, and an AUC-ROC of 1.0. Additionally, YOLOv5 and YOLOv8 models (Nano, Small, Medium variants) were trained on 43 annotated videos, with YOLOv5-Nano and YOLOv8-Nano demonstrating excellent detection capability on unseen test data. This dual-stage framework offers a practical, computationally efficient solution for automated Chagas diagnosis, particularly valuable for resource-constrained laboratories with poor imaging quality.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Copyright: © 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Publisher Keywords:	Chagas disease, T. cruzi, motion detection, deep learning, YOLO, automated diagnosis, microscopy, Chagas disease, T. cruzi, YOLO, automated diagnosis, deep learning, microscopy, motion detection
Subjects:	R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine R Medicine > RC Internal medicine
Departments:	School of Science & Technology School of Science & Technology > Department of Computer Science
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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