Automatic bright-field smear microscopy for diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis.

In recent decades, many studies have been published on the use of automatic smear microscopy for diagnosing pulmonary tuberculosis (TB). Most of them deal with a preliminary step of the diagnosis, the bacilli detection, whereas sputum smear microscopy for diagnosis of pulmonary TB comprises detecting and reporting the number of bacilli found in at least 100 microscopic fields, according to the 5 grading scales (negative, scanty, 1+, 2+ and 3+) endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO). Pulmonary TB diagnosis in bright-field smear microscopy, however, depends upon the attention of a trained and motivated technician, while the automated TB diagnosis requires little or no interpretation by a technician. As far as we know, this work proposes the first automatic method for pulmonary TB diagnosis in bright-field smear microscopy, according to the WHO recommendations. The proposed method comprises a semantic segmentation step, using a deep neural network, followed by a filtering step aiming to reduce the number of false positives (false bacilli): color and shape filtering. In semantic segmentation, different configurations of encoders are evaluated, using depth-wise separable convolution layers and channel attention mechanism. The proposed method was evaluated with a large, robust, and annotated image dataset designed for this purpose, consisting of 250 testing sets, 50 sets for each of the 5 TB diagnostic classes. The following performance metrics were obtained for automatic pulmonary TB diagnosis by smear microscopy: mean precision of 0.894, mean recall of 0.896, and mean F1-score of 0.895.

Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests:Cicero Ferreira Fernandes Costa Filho reports financial support was provided by Samsung Electronics of Amazonia Ltda. Marly Guimaraes Fernandes Costa reports financial support was provided by Samsung Electronics of Amazonia Ltda. Mikaela Kalline Serrao reports financial support was provided by Samsung Electronics of Amazonia Ltda. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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