Image analysis and machine learning for detecting malaria

Introduction : To assess evidence of an association between intimate partner violence (IPV) and HIV infection among women. Methods : Medline/PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, EBSCO, Ovid, Cochrane HIV/AIDS Group’s Specialized Register and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials were searched up to 20 May 2013 to identify studies that examined the association between IPV and HIV infection in women. We included studies on women aged ≥15 years, in any form of sexually intimate relationship with a male partner. Results : Twenty-eight studies [(19 cross-sectional, 5 cohorts and 4 case-control studies) involving 331,468 individuals in 16 countries – the US (eight studies), South Africa (four studies), East Africa (10 studies), India (three studies), Brazil (one study) and multiple low-income countries (two studies)] were included. Results were pooled using RevMan 5.0. To moderate effect estimates, we analyzed all data using the random effects model, irrespective of heterogeneity level. Pooled results of cohort studies indicated that physical IPV [pooled RR (95% CI): 1.22 (1.01, 1.46)] and any type of IPV [pooled RR (95% CI): 1.28 (1.00, 1.64)] were significantly associated with HIV infection among women. Results of cross-sectional studies demonstrated significant associations of physical IPV with HIV infection among women [pooled OR (95% CI): 1.44 (1.10, 1.87)]. Similarly, results of cross-sectional studies indicated that combination of physical and sexual IPV [pooled OR (95% CI): 2.00 (1.24, 3.22) and any type of IPV [pooled OR (95% CI): 1.41 (1.16, 1.73)] were significantly associated with HIV infection among women. Conclusions : Available evidence suggests a moderate statistically significant association between IPV and HIV infection among women. To further elucidate the strength of the association between IPV and HIV infection among women, there is a need for high-quality follow-up studies conducted in different geographical regions of the world, and among individuals of diverse racial/cultural backgrounds and varying levels of HIV risks. Keywords: intimate partner violence; women’s health; systematic review; meta-analysis; gender-based violence; HIV/AIDS. (Published: 13 February 2014) Citation: Li Y et al. Journal of the International AIDS Society 2014, 17 :18845 http://www.jiasociety.org/index.php/jias/article/view/18845 | http://dx.doi.org/10.7448/IAS.17.1.18845 To access the supplementary material to this article please see Supplementary Files in the column to the right (under Article Tools).

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.7448/IAS.17.1.18845

Intimate partner violence and HIV infection among women: a systematic review and meta‐analysis

White blood cells identification system based on convolutional deep neural learning networks.

The detection and classification of white blood cells (WBCs, also known as Leukocytes) is a hot issue because of its important applications in disease diagnosis. Nowadays the morphological analysis of blood cells is operated manually by skilled operators, which results in some drawbacks such as slowness of the analysis, a non-standard accuracy, and the dependence on the operator’s skills. Although there have been many papers studying the detection of WBCs or classification of WBCs independently, few papers consider them together. This paper proposes an automatic detection and classification system for WBCs from peripheral blood images. It firstly proposes an algorithm to detect WBCs from the microscope images based on the simple relation of colors R, B and morphological operation. Then a granularity feature (pairwise rotation invariant co-occurrence local binary pattern, PRICoLBP feature) and SVM are applied to classify eosinophil and basophil from other WBCs firstly. Lastly, convolution neural networks are used to extract features in high level from WBCs automatically, and a random forest is applied to these features to recognize the other three kinds of WBCs: neutrophil, monocyte and lymphocyte. Some detection experiments on Cellavison database and ALL-IDB database show that our proposed detection method has better effect almost than iterative threshold method with less cost time, and some classification experiments show that our proposed classification method has better accuracy almost than some other methods.

Automatic detection and classification of leukocytes using convolutional neural networks

Background 
Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a significant health problem that has been associated with HIV infection in numerous studies. We aimed to systematically review the literature on relationships between IPV and HIV in order to describe the prevalence of IPV in people with HIV, the prevalence of HIV in people experiencing IPV, the association between IPV and HIV, and evidence regarding mechanisms of risk and interventions.


Methods 
Data sources were 10 electronic databases and reference lists. Studies were included if they reported data on the relationship between IPV and HIV. All records were independently reviewed by two authors at the stages of title and abstract review and full text review. Any abstract considered eligible by either reviewer was reviewed in full, and any disagreement regarding eligibility of full texts or data extracted was resolved by discussion. 


Results 
101 articles were included. Experiencing IPV and HIV infection were associated in unadjusted analyses in most studies, as well as in adjusted analyses in many studies. The findings of qualitative and quantitative studies assessing potential mechanisms linking IPV and HIV were variable. Few interventions have been assessed, but two identified in this review were promising in terms of preventing IPV, though not HIV infection.


Conclusions 
Experiencing IPV and HIV infection tend to be associated in unadjusted analyses, suggesting that IPV screening and linkage with relevant programs and services may be valuable. It is unclear whether there is a causal association between experiencing IPV and HIV infection. Research should focus on defining parameters of IPV which are relevant to HIV infection, including type of IPV and period of exposure and risk, on assessing potential mechanisms, and on developing and assessing interventions which build on the strengths of existing studies.

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A systematic review of the relationships between intimate partner violence and HIV/AIDS

Graphical abstractDisplay Omitted Total count and differential count of leukocytes or white blood cells (WBC) in blood samples are very important pathological factors for diagnosing a disease. There are not enough pathological infrastructures in the remote places of India and other developing countries. The objective of this work is to design a system, compatible with telemedicine, for automatic calculation of the total count and differential count of WBC from the blood smear slides. Hemocytometer based WBC counting provides more accurate result than manual counting, but hemocytometer preparation process needs expertise. As this device is targeted for remote places, blood smear technique is adopted to reduce the overhead of the operator. In the proposed system, microscopic images of blood smear sample are processed to highlight the WBC for segmentation. Region segmentation procedure involves background scaling and redundant region elimination from the region set. After segmentation, the more accurate region boundary is restored by using gradient based region growing with neighbourhood influence. Individual regions are separately classified on the basis of shape, size, color and texture features independently using different fuzzy and non-fuzzy techniques. A final decision is taken by combining these classification results, which is a kind of hybridization. A set of rules has been generated for making final classification decision based on outputs from various classifiers. The sensitivity and specificity of the system are found to be 96.4% and 79.6%, respectively on a database of 150 blood smear slides collected from different health centres of Kolkata Municipal Corporation, Kolkata, India.

Blood smear analyzer for white blood cell counting

There is still a paucity of research on the sociodemographic and other underlying factors associated with HIV transmission among women in India. This study was designed to investigate such factors in sexually experienced Indian women. We used data from the National Family Health Survey 3 (NFHS-3), which tested 52,853 women for HIV, including 27,556 husband and wife pairs. Significant risk factors for all women and married women only were: aged 26-35 years (adjusted odds ratios [AORs] = 3.65 and 2.53, respectively), being poor (AORs = 1.57 and 1.79), having had a genital sore in the last 12 months (AORs = 3.16 and 3.01) and having more than one sexual partner (AORs = 5.95 and 5.15). For husband and wife pairs, suffering sexual violence (AOR = 2.63), husband having other wife/wives (AOR = 3.40) and husband's education being secondary level or higher (AOR = 0.43) were significant. Intervention strategies in India should target young married (aged 25-35 years) and formerly married urban women who are poor, as well as those who have suffered sexual violence from their husbands, and/or are (or whose husbands are) multi-partnered. Empowerment of women is fundamental to HIV/AIDS prevention in India.

/pdf/factors-associated-with-hiv-infection-among-indian-women-iyqkrq90qk.pdf

Factors associated with HIV infection among Indian women

Background and Objectives Type-2 diabetes is one of the chronic diseases. This disease can be controlled by adjusting the dose of medicine, which is calculated from regular monitoring of blood sugar level. Blood glucose estimation methods are grouped into two categories direct and indirect. The direct method (invasive in nature) provides more accurate results; but people are not interested to test their blood several times in the day; because blood sample collection process is painful. On the other hand, indirect estimation methods are popular due to its non-invasive nature. The most widely used non-invasive blood glucose estimation method is based on urine sugar level estimation. Urine sugar level estimation is a chemical process requiring manual involvement. Human nature is very different; they dislike the repetitive work of testing urine regularly, although the process is not at all cumbersome. It will be very helpful if a system exists, which monitors urine sugar level automatically from the toilet. Methods This work describes an automatic technique to estimate blood sugar level from urine. The contribution of this work is as follows: • A complete customized mechanical unit, which controls the chemical process of urine sugar estimation. • An automatic technique to build the fuzzy membership functions from training data set. This system includes a chemical process control along with a fuzzy logic based color estimation technique, where fuzzy membership functions are derived from training data set. One salient feature of this fuzzy membership functions generator is that it is tuneable, that means it allows calibration after constructing membership functions. From application point of view, it is an intelligent toilet to keep track of blood sugar level from urine. The system is divided into two sub sections named as a control section and a computation section. The control section includes the control of mechanical units and chemical process initiation. The activeness of chemical reagent changes over time, this system has the provision to handle such situation through volume adjustment chamber. The control section includes a lot of valve control, they are interdependent. Petri-net is used to synchronise them. Computation section is used for estimation of urine sugar level from the changed color of Benedict's Qualitative Solution. Result From operational point of view, this system is a combination of sequential and parallel sub processes. It can be divided into 9 sub processes. The time required to complete all 9 processes is 660.5 second. This time includes sample collection time, chemical reaction time, result calculation and system cleaning time. The average Sensitivity, Specificity and error rate of the system are as follows 88.0225%, 95.95% and 5.765%. PIPEv4.3.0 is used to analysis the Petri-net. As per the analysis report, the system is safe (reliable). Discussion This system is efficient to estimate blood sugar level from urine. This system senses the urine sugar level indirectly using the color sensor. The color sensor is not directly in touch with the chemical of the reaction chamber. The normal toilet cleaning (acidic) solution can be used to clean the chambers. So, maintenance process is quite easy. The proposed system can reduce the probability of glaucoma, kidney problem etc. by assisting doctors to control high blood sugar level through regular monitoring of urine sugar level.

Intelligent Toilet System for Non-invasive Estimation of Blood-Sugar Level from Urine

This cross sectional record based institutional study was conducted in the Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Burdwan Medical College, Burdwan over ten years (1999-2008) aiming analysis of eclamptic mothers for evaluation of maternal and perinatal outcome with different anticonvulsant medications. Total 5991 pregnant mothers with eclampsia admitted in the inpatient department of the tertiary care teaching hospital were recruited for the study, irrespective of their previous antenatal check up history. Subjects with known seizure disorders were excluded from the study. The subjects were managed according to standard regimens (Menon, Ph-sodium, diazepam & magnesium sulphate) and results were documented in standardised format. Case fatality rate, mean induction delivery time & birth-weight, perinatal mortality rates were recorded. Study reveals that the incidence of eclampsia <20 years was 6.97% and majority (5.41%) came from rural areas. Eclampsia was noted primarily in primigravida (7.43%) and unbooked (6.41%) mothers. Ante partum eclampsia predominated (64%) and incidence of caesarean section was 22.25%.The overall case fatality rate was 6.05% and eclampsia contributed 27.85% of all maternal deaths during the last two years of the study period. The overall incidence of low birth weight baby was 26.96% and perinatal mortality was 30.33% (1411/4651).The incidence of perinatal mortality and low birth weight babies are lower in the last 4 years when compared to earlier studies. Proper socio-demographic assessment of pregnancy with eclampsia, planned delivery, shorter induction delivery interval, good control of convulsion by magnesium sulphate, intensive intranatal monitoring causes less maternal and perinatal morbidity and mortality.

Eclampsia-scenario in a hospital- a ten years study

The analysis and counting of blood cells in a microscope image can provide useful information concerning to the health of a person. In particular, morphological analysis of red blood cell’s deformations can effectively detect important disease like malaria. Blood images, obtained by the microscope, which is coupled with a digital camera, are analyzed by the computer for diagnosis or can be transmitted easily to clinical centers than liquid blood samples. Automatic analysis system for the presence of Plasmodium in microscopic image of blood can greatly help pathologists and doctors that typically inspect blood films manually. Unfortunately, the analysis made by human experts is not rapid and not yet standardized due to the operators’ capabilities and tiredness. The paper shows how effectively and accurately it is possible to identify the Plasmodium in the blood film. In particular, the paper presents how to enhance the microscopic image and filter out the unnecessary segments followed by the threshold based segmentation and recognize the presence of Plasmodium. The proposed system can be deployed in the remote area as a supporting aid for telemedicine technology and only basic training is sufficient to operate it. This system achieved more than 98% accuracy for the samples collected to test this system.

Pramit Ghosh

Papers

Blood smear analyzer for white blood cell counting

Factors associated with HIV infection among Indian women

Intelligent Toilet System for Non-invasive Estimation of Blood-Sugar Level from Urine

Eclampsia-scenario in a hospital- a ten years study

Medical Aid for Automatic Detection of Malaria