Determination of the mechanoelastic properties of parasites via analysis of their microscopic images

A novel methodology is introduced here that exploits microscopic images of domestic animalspsila parasites in arbitrary deformation instances, so as to verify assumptions about their mechanoelastic properties. The obtained knowledge of these properties manifests parasite body characteristics that are deformation invariant, thus allowing for unwrapping them. Next, we have stated differential equations that govern the parasite body deformation and we have solved them by performing a set of equivalent image operations on the deformed body images. This process furnishes the parasite undeformed version from its deformed image. The method has been applied to a dataset of 193 microscopic images of highly deformed parasites. It is demonstrated that different orientations and deformations of the same parasite give rise to practically the same undeformed shape, thus confirming the consistency of the approach.