<i>Trichomonas vaginalis</i> Detection Using Two Convolutional Neural Networks with Encoder-Decoder Architecture

Abstract

Diagnosis of Trichomonas vaginalis infection is one of the most important factors in the routine examination of leucorrhea. According to the motion characteristics of Trichomonas vaginalis, a viable detection method is the use of a microscopic camera to record videos of leucorrhea samples and video object detection algorithms for detection. Most Trichomonas vaginalis is defocused and displays as shadow regions on microscopic images, and it is hard to recognize the movement of shadow regions using traditional video object detection algorithms. In order to solve this problem, we propose two convolutional neural networks based on an encoder-decoder architecture. The first network has the ability to learn the difference between frames and utilizes the image and optical flow information of three consecutive frames as the input to perform rough detection. The second network corrects the coarse contours and uses the image information and the rough detection result of the current frame as the input to perform fine detection. With these two networks applied, the metric value of the mean intersection over union of Trichomonas vaginalis achieves 72.09% on test videos. The proposed networks can effectively detect defocused Trichomonas vaginalis and suppress false alarms caused by the motion of formed elements or impurities.

Keywords

• <i>Trichomonas vaginalis</i> detection
• rough and fine detection
• video object detection
• convolutional neural network
• encoder-decoder architecture