1. Remote analysis of sputum smears for mycobacterium tuberculosis quantification using digital crowdsourcing.
- Author
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Delgado, Lara García, Postigo, María, Cuadrado, Daniel, Gil-Casanova, Sara, Martínez, Álvaro Martínez, Linares, María, Merino, Paloma, Gimo, Manuel, Blanco, Silvia, Bassat, Quique, Santos, Andrés, García-Basteiro, Alberto L., Ledesma-Carbayo, María J., and Luengo-Oroz, Miguel Á.
- Subjects
DIGITAL images ,SPUTUM ,CROWDSOURCING ,TUBERCULOSIS ,MIDDLE-income countries ,IMAGE analysis ,MYCOBACTERIUM tuberculosis - Abstract
Worldwide, TB is one of the top 10 causes of death and the leading cause from a single infectious agent. Although the development and roll out of Xpert MTB/RIF has recently become a major breakthrough in the field of TB diagnosis, smear microscopy remains the most widely used method for TB diagnosis, especially in low- and middle-income countries. This research tests the feasibility of a crowdsourced approach to tuberculosis image analysis. In particular, we investigated whether anonymous volunteers with no prior experience would be able to count acid-fast bacilli in digitized images of sputum smears by playing an online game. Following this approach 1790 people identified the acid-fast bacilli present in 60 digitized images, the best overall performance was obtained with a specific number of combined analysis from different players and the performance was evaluated with the F1 score, sensitivity and positive predictive value, reaching values of 0.933, 0.968 and 0.91, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022
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