title: Optimization of a cell counting algorithm for mobile point-of-care testing platforms.
abstract: In a point-of-care (POC) setting, it is critically important to reliably count the number of specific cells in a blood sample. Software-based cell counting, which is far faster than manual counting, while much cheaper than hardware-based counting, has emerged as an attractive solution potentially applicable to mobile POC testing. However, the existing software-based algorithm based on the normalized cross-correlation (NCC) method is too time- and, thus, energy-consuming to be deployed for battery-powered mobile POC testing platforms. In this paper, we identify inefficiencies in the NCC-based algorithm and propose two synergistic optimization techniques that can considerably reduce the runtime and, thus, energy consumption of the original algorithm with negligible impact on counting accuracy. We demonstrate that an AndroidTM smart phone running the optimized algorithm consumes 11.5× less runtime than the original algorithm.
authors.affiliation: Real-Time Cyber-Physical System Laboratory, Daegu Gyeoungbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST), Daegu 711-873, Korea. dahan@dgist.ac.kr.
authors.forename: DaeHan
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Ahn
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA. nskim3@wisc.edu.
authors.forename: Nam Sung
authors.initials: NS
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.affiliation: Cybernetics Laboratory, Daegu Gyeoungbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST), Daegu 711-873, Korea. nanobiomems@dgist.ac.kr.
authors.forename: SangJun
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Moon
authors.affiliation: Real-Time Cyber-Physical System Laboratory, Daegu Gyeoungbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST), Daegu 711-873, Korea. tjpark@dgist.ac.kr.
authors.forename: Taejoon
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Park
authors.affiliation: Real-Time Cyber-Physical System Laboratory, Daegu Gyeoungbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST), Daegu 711-873, Korea. son@dgist.ac.kr.
authors.forename: Sang Hyuk
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Son
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D002452:Cell Count / Q000379:methods*; D040421:Cell Phone; D006801:Humans; D012984:Software