A user-friendly software to easily count Anopheles egg batches.
BACKGROUND
Studies on malaria vector ecology and development/evaluation of vector control strategies often require measures of mosquito life history traits. Assessing the fecundity of malaria vectors can be carried out by counting eggs laid by Anopheles females. However, manually counting the eggs is time consuming, tedious, and error prone.


METHODS
In this paper we present a newly developed software for high precision automatic egg counting. The software written in the Java programming language proposes a user-friendly interface and a complete online manual. It allows the inspection of results by the operator and includes proper tools for manual corrections. The user can in fact correct any details on the acquired results by a mouse click. Time saving is significant and errors due to loss of concentration are avoided.


RESULTS
The software was tested over 16 randomly chosen images from 2 different experiments. The results show that the proposed automatic method produces results that are close to the ground truth.


CONCLUSIONS
The proposed approaches demonstrated a very high level of robustness. The adoption of the proposed software package will save many hours of labor to the bench scientist. The software needs no particular configuration and is freely available for download on: http://w3.ualg.pt/∼hshah/eggcounter/.
Departamento de Engenharia Eletrónica e Informática, Universidade do Algarve, 8008-139 Faro, Portugal.
Ali
A
Mollahosseini
Marie
M
Rossignol
Cédric
C
Pennetier
Anna
A
Cohuet
António Dos
AD
Anjos
Fabrice
F
Chandre
Hamid Reza
HR
Shahbazkia
D000818:Animals; D000852:Anopheles / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D010058:Oviposition / Q000502:physiology*; D010063:Ovum / Q000502:physiology*; D012984:Software