Segmentação, classificação e quantificação de bacilos de tuberculose em imagens de baciloscopia de campo claro através do emprego de uma nova técnica de classificação de pixels utilizando máquinas de vetores de suporte

Abstract

Tuberculosis (TB) is a contagious disease caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis that primarily affects the lungs and reaches over 8.8 million people worldwide. Although the number of cases of TB disease and deaths has fallen over the past years, this disease still remains a serious health problem in developing countries. Currently, as initial tests for the diagnosis of TB are used methods of smear bright field and fluorescence. The first is used mostly in developing countries, due to low cost, the second is the preferred method in developed countries to be more sensitive. Among the many challenges for the control of this disease is the development of a rapid, efficient and low cost for the diagnosis of tuberculosis. The process of diagnosis of smear-field course is time consuming, manual and error-prone, so that there is a high rate of false negatives. Various techniques for pattern recognition in the image smear bright field microscopy have been designed to recognize and count of the rods. This paper describes a new method for segmentation of tubercle bacilli in sputum bright field. The method proposed in this dissertation uses a classifier consisting of a support vector machine. The differential method is proposed in the variables selected for the input of the classifier. They were selected from four color spaces: RGB, HSI, YCbCr and Lab used to both individual characteristics such as subtractions of characteristics of the same color space and different color spaces. We investigated a total of 30 features. The best features were selected using the selection technique scalar features. With the proposed method was reached a sensitivity of 94%. However, further steps for noise reduction are required to minimize the classification errors.