Computer Aided Image Processing to Facilitate Determination of Congruence in Manual Classification of Mitochondrial Morphologies in Toxoplasma gondii Tissue Cysts

Brooke C. Place, Cortni Troublefield, Robert D. Murphy, Anthony P. Sinai, Abhijit Patwardhan

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that chronically infects about a third of the world's population. During chronic infection, the parasite resides within tissue cysts in the form of poorly understood bradyzoites which can number in the thousands. Our prior work showed that these bradyzoites are metabolically active exhibiting heterogeneous replication potential. The morphological plasticity of the mitochondrion potentially informs about parasite metabolic state. We developed an image processing based program to assist manual classification of mitochondrial morphologies by trained operators to collect data and statistics from the manual classification of shapes. We sought to determine whether certain morphologies were readily classifiable and the congruence among manual classifiers, i.e. the degree to which different operators would place the same objects within the same class. Results from three operators classifying mitochondrial morphologies from 5 tissue cyst images showed that among the four classes, one (Blobs) were the easiest to classify. There was remarkable congruence between 2 of the 3 operators in classifying the objects (96%), while the agreement among all 3 operators was somewhat modest (57%). Such information would be valuable for biologists studying these parasites as well as in development of fully automated methods of morphological classification.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2021
Pages3509-3513
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781728111797
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021
Event43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2021 - Virtual, Online, Mexico
Duration: Nov 1 2021Nov 5 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBS
ISSN (Print)1557-170X

Conference

Conference43rd Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, EMBC 2021
Country/TerritoryMexico
CityVirtual, Online
Period11/1/2111/5/21

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 IEEE.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Signal Processing
  • Biomedical Engineering
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Health Informatics

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