Spectroscopic approach of multispectral imaging of plasmodium falciparum - infected human erythrocytes

This paper describes a spectroscopic approach for hyperspectral imaging of Plasmodium Falciparum infected human red blood cells (RBCs). We have performed a broad-band hyperspectral microscope which has been used to acquire a number of images in 370 nm to 1100 nm range, from fresh human RBCs infected by Plasmodium Falciparum. These images have been analyzed using the fast computation of entropies and mutual information for color and multispectral images. This has allowed us to determine the matching set of wavelengths for spectroscopic and morphological studies. Extracted quantitative absorption spectra of parts of parasites are presented. This set of data has also been analysis using the principal component analysis. The calculated data permit us to find out the correlation of all the RGB components of the data sets. The outcome has been interpreted as qualitative spectroscopic information on the trophozoite. These results open up the possibility to classify the biological structures contained by the parasite using hyperspectral imaging.