A protozoan parasite extraction scheme for digital microscopic images.

Pathogenic protozoan parasites can cause human to get many diseases, such as, amoebiasis, typhoid fever and cholera, etc. Different protozoan parasites vary greatly in their structural and biochemical properties. Digital images are extensively applied to medical fields for doctors and pathologists to analyze pathological sections and further diagnose diseases. The aim of this paper is to develop protozoan parasite extraction techniques to segment protozoan parasites from microscopic images. The proposed scheme has precise segmentation ability even if the image is with poor quality or complex background. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can gain 96.64% average correct rate, and about 0.04, 0.45 and 0.06 of the average error rates: misclassification error (ME), region non-uniformity (RN) and relative foreground area error (RFAE), respectively. 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.