Title :
Direct detection of Lyme disease by digital microscopy
Author :
Hall, Thomas ; Bushmich, Sandra ; Krider, Hallie ; Fox, Martin
Author_Institution :
Connecticut Univ., Storrs, CT, USA
Abstract :
Studies were performed to test the hypothesis that an early direct diagnostic test for Lyme disease can be developed. This test involves automatic microscopic scanning of a relatively large volume of body fluids for the sparsely occurring Lyme disease causing agent, the spirochete bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi. Preliminary results indicate that segmentation, measurement, and classification techniques can be used to differentiate spirochetes from other materials in microscope images of blood smears stained with a fluorescent dye
Keywords :
computerised picture processing; medical diagnostic computing; optical microscopy; patient diagnosis; Borrelia burgdorferi; Lyme disease; automatic microscopic scanning; blood smears; body fluids; classification; digital microscopy; direct diagnostic test; fluorescent dye; medical computer technique; segmentation; spirochete bacterium; Blood; Cameras; Diseases; Fluorescence; Image analysis; Image segmentation; Microscopy; Shape; System testing; Systems engineering and theory;
Conference_Titel :
Bioengineering Conference, 1990., Proceedings of the 1990 Sixteenth Annual Northeast
Conference_Location :
State College, PA
DOI :
10.1109/NEBC.1990.66289
