A machine learning model of microscopic agglutination test for diagnosis of leptospirosis

PLoS One. 2021 Nov 16;16(11):e0259907. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0259907. eCollection 2021.

Abstract

Leptospirosis is a zoonosis caused by the pathogenic bacterium Leptospira. The Microscopic Agglutination Test (MAT) is widely used as the gold standard for diagnosis of leptospirosis. In this method, diluted patient serum is mixed with serotype-determined Leptospires, and the presence or absence of aggregation is determined under a dark-field microscope to calculate the antibody titer. Problems of the current MAT method are 1) a requirement of examining many specimens per sample, and 2) a need of distinguishing contaminants from true aggregates to accurately identify positivity. Therefore, increasing efficiency and accuracy are the key to refine MAT. It is possible to achieve efficiency and standardize accuracy at the same time by automating the decision-making process. In this study, we built an automatic identification algorithm of MAT using a machine learning method to determine agglutination within microscopic images. The machine learned the features from 316 positive and 230 negative MAT images created with sera of Leptospira-infected (positive) and non-infected (negative) hamsters, respectively. In addition to the acquired original images, wavelet-transformed images were also considered as features. We utilized a support vector machine (SVM) as a proposed decision method. We validated the trained SVMs with 210 positive and 154 negative images. When the features were obtained from original or wavelet-transformed images, all negative images were misjudged as positive, and the classification performance was very low with sensitivity of 1 and specificity of 0. In contrast, when the histograms of wavelet coefficients were used as features, the performance was greatly improved with sensitivity of 0.99 and specificity of 0.99. We confirmed that the current algorithm judges the positive or negative of agglutinations in MAT images and gives the further possibility of automatizing MAT procedure.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Agglutination Tests / methods*
  • Algorithms
  • Animals
  • Cricetinae
  • Decision Support Systems, Clinical
  • Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / methods*
  • Leptospirosis / diagnostic imaging*
  • Leptospirosis / immunology
  • Male
  • Microscopy
  • Sensitivity and Specificity
  • Support Vector Machine
  • Wavelet Analysis

Grants and funding

This work was partially supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 18K16174 and 21K16320 to R.O., the discretionary fund of Tottori University President to Y.O. and R.O, and the Research Program of the International Platform for Dryland Research and Education, Tottori University to J.F. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. There was no additional external funding received for this study.