Remote analysis of sputum smears for mycobacterium tuberculosis quantification using digital crowdsourcing

Time to read:

1 minute

Publication date


19 May 2022

Published in


PLoS ONE

Keywords


Mycobacterium, tuberculosis, digitized images, remote analysis

Citation


Delgado LG, Postigo M, Cuadrado D, Gil-Casanova S, Martínez ÁM, Linares M, et al. (2022) Remote analysis of sputum smears for mycobacterium tuberculosis quantification using digital crowdsourcing. PLoS ONE 17(5): e0268494.

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.