Vector-Borne Disease
End-to-end Malaria Diagnosis and 3D Cell Rendering with Deep Learning
Malaria is a parasitic infection that poses a significant burden on global health. It kills one child every 30 seconds and over one million people annually. If diagnosed in a timely manner, however, most people can be effectively treated with antimalarial therapy. Several deaths due to malaria are byproducts of disparities in the social determinants of health; the current gold standard for diagnosing malaria requires microscopes, reagents, and other equipment that most patients of low socioeconomic brackets do not have access to. In this paper, we propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that allows for rapid automated diagnosis of malaria (achieving a high classification accuracy of 98%), as well as a deep neural network (DNN) based three-dimensional (3D) modeling algorithm that renders 3D models of parasitic cells in augmented reality (AR). This creates an opportunity to optimize the current workflow for malaria diagnosis and demonstrates potential for deep learning models to improve telemedicine practices and patient health literacy on a global scale. Our website is accessible here.
Diptera.ai
Mosquitoes are the most dangerous animal on earth. Global warming is driving these mosquitoes to spread rapidly, endangering many more. Mosquitoes are the most dangerous animal on earth. Global warming is driving these mosquitoes to spread rapidly, endangering many more. Diptera.ai is developing a technology to make the sterile insect technique (SIT) for mosquito control affordable & accessible for all.
Climate-driven statistical models as effective predictors of local dengue incidence in Costa Rica: A Generalized Additive Model and Random Forest approach
Vรกsquez, Paola, Lorรญa, Antonio, Sanchez, Fabio, Barboza, Luis A.
Climate has been an important factor in shaping the distribution and incidence of dengue cases in tropical and subtropical countries. In Costa Rica, a tropical country with distinctive micro-climates, dengue has been endemic since its introduction in 1993, inflicting substantial economic, social, and public health repercussions. Using the number of dengue reported cases and climate data from 2007-2017, we fitted a prediction model applying a Generalized Additive Model (GAM) and Random Forest (RF) approach, which allowed us to retrospectively predict dengue occurrence in five climatological diverse municipalities around the country.
Deep Learning and Medical Image Analysis with Keras - PyImageSearch
In this tutorial, you will learn how to apply deep learning to perform medical image analysis. Specifically, you will discover how to use the Keras deep learning library to automatically analyze medical images for malaria testing. Such a deep learning medical imaging system can help reduce the 400,000 deaths per year caused by malaria. Today's tutorial was inspired by two sources. They've helped me as I've been studying deep learning. I live in an area of Africa that is prone to disease, especially malaria. I'd like to be able to apply computer vision to help reduce malaria outbreaks. Do you have any tutorials on medical imaging?
Open-source discovery of chemical leads for next-generation chemoprotective antimalarials
Malaria parasites are evolutionarily prepared to resist drug attack. Resistance is emerging to even the latest frontline combination therapies, which target the blood stages of the Plasmodium parasite. As an alternative strategy, Antonova-Koch et al. investigated the possibilities of drugs against liver-stage parasites (see the Perspective by Phillips and Goldberg). To do so, they devised a luciferase-reporter drug screen for the rodent parasite Plasmodium berghei. Three rounds of increasingly stringent screening were used. From this regime, several chemotypes that inhibit Plasmodium mitochondrial electron transport were identified. Excitingly, several new scaffolds, with as-yet-unknown modes of action but solely targeting the parasites' liver stages, emerged as promising drug leads for further development. Science, this issue p. eaat9446; see also p. 1112 Malaria remains a devastating disease, affecting 216 million people annually, with 445,000 deaths occurring primarily in children under 5 years old. Malaria treatment relies primarily on drugs that target the disease-causing asexual blood stages (ABS) of Plasmodium parasites, the organisms responsible for human malaria. Whereas travelers may rely on short-term daily chemoprotective drugs, those living in endemic regions require long-term malaria protection such as insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) and vector control. However, ITNs do not fully shield individuals from malaria, may lose potency with time, and can be bulky and difficult to use.
Google parent Alphabet has grand global plan to breed disease-carrying mosquitoes out of existence
SAN FRANCISCO โ Silicon Valley researchers are attacking flying bloodsuckers in California's Fresno County. A white high-top Mercedes van winds its way through the suburban sprawl and strip malls as a swarm of male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes shoot out of a black plastic tube on the passenger-side window. These pests are tiny and, with a wingspan of just a few millimeters, all but invisible. "You hear that little beating sound?" says Kathleen Parkes, a spokesperson for Verily Life Sciences, a unit of Alphabet. Jacob Crawford, a Verily senior scientist riding with Parkes, begins describing a mosquito-control technique with dazzling potential.
Rewriting the Code of Life
Early on an unusually blustery day in June, Kevin Esvelt climbed aboard a ferry at Woods Hole, bound for Nantucket Island. Esvelt, an assistant professor of biological engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was on his way to present to local health officials a plan for ridding the island of one of its most persistent problems: Lyme disease. He had been up for much of the night working on his slides, and the fatigue showed. He had misaligned the buttons on his gray pin-striped shirt, and the rings around his deep-blue eyes made him look like a sandy-haired raccoon. Esvelt, who is thirty-four, directs the "sculpting evolution" group at M.I.T., where he and his colleagues are attempting to design molecular tools capable of fundamentally altering the natural world. If the residents of Nantucket agree, Esvelt intends to use those tools to rewrite the DNA of white-footed mice to make them immune to the bacteria that cause Lyme and other tick-borne diseases. He and his team would breed the mice in the laboratory and then, as an initial experiment, release them on an uninhabited island. If the number of infected ticks begins to plummet, he would seek permission to repeat the process on Nantucket and on nearby Martha's Vineyard. More than a quarter of Nantucket's residents have been infected with Lyme, which has become one of the most rapidly spreading diseases in the United States. The illness is often accompanied by a red bull's-eye rash, along with fever and chills. When the disease is caught early enough, it can be cured in most cases with a single course of antibiotics. For many people, though, pain and neurological symptoms can persist for years. In communities throughout the Northeast, the fear of ticks has changed the nature of summer itself--few parents these days would permit a child to run barefoot through the grass or wander blithely into the woods. "What if we could wave our hands and make this problem go away?" Esvelt asked the two dozen officials and members of the public who had assembled at the island's police station for his presentation. He explained that white-footed mice are the principal reservoir of Lyme disease, which they pass, through ticks, to humans.