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Krti is broadly interested in the ecology of environmental diseases, as they link to climate and anthropogenic stressors. She studies coastal and oceanic environmental diseases that have links to human, terrestrial, and aquatic systems. Krti utilizes computer vision / deep learning, artificial intelligence, and field experiments for her work, and is interested in long-term implications for planetary health and environmental justice.

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  • Identification of Snails and Schistosoma of Medical Importance via Convolutional Neural Networks: A Proof-of-Concept Application for Human Schistosomiasis FRONTIERS IN PUBLIC HEALTH Tallam, K., Liu, Z., Chamberlin, A. J., Jones, I. J., Shome, P., Riveau, G., Ndione, R. A., Bandagny, L., Jouanard, N., Van Eck, P., Ngo, T., Sokolow, S. H., De Leo, G. A. 2021; 9: 642895

    Abstract

    In recent decades, computer vision has proven remarkably effective in addressing diverse issues in public health, from determining the diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment of diseases in humans to predicting infectious disease outbreaks. Here, we investigate whether convolutional neural networks (CNNs) can also demonstrate effectiveness in classifying the environmental stages of parasites of public health importance and their invertebrate hosts. We used schistosomiasis as a reference model. Schistosomiasis is a debilitating parasitic disease transmitted to humans via snail intermediate hosts. The parasite affects more than 200 million people in tropical and subtropical regions. We trained our CNN, a feed-forward neural network, on a limited dataset of 5,500 images of snails and 5,100 images of cercariae obtained from schistosomiasis transmission sites in the Senegal River Basin, a region in western Africa that is hyper-endemic for the disease. The image set included both images of two snail genera that are relevant to schistosomiasis transmission - that is, Bulinus spp. and Biomphalaria pfeifferi - as well as snail images that are non-component hosts for human schistosomiasis. Cercariae shed from Bi. pfeifferi and Bulinus spp. snails were classified into 11 categories, of which only two, S. haematobium and S. mansoni, are major etiological agents of human schistosomiasis. The algorithms, trained on 80% of the snail and parasite dataset, achieved 99% and 91% accuracy for snail and parasite classification, respectively, when used on the hold-out validation dataset - a performance comparable to that of experienced parasitologists. The promising results of this proof-of-concept study suggests that this CNN model, and potentially similar replicable models, have the potential to support the classification of snails and parasite of medical importance. In remote field settings where machine learning algorithms can be deployed on cost-effective and widely used mobile devices, such as smartphones, these models can be a valuable complement to laboratory identification by trained technicians. Future efforts must be dedicated to increasing dataset sizes for model training and validation, as well as testing these algorithms in diverse transmission settings and geographies.

    View details for DOI 10.3389/fpubh.2021.642895

    View details for Web of Science ID 000678775200001

    View details for PubMedID 34336754

    View details for PubMedCentralID PMC8319642

  • Modeling epidemics: A primer and Numerus Model Builder implementation Epidemics Getz, W. 2018

    View details for DOI 10.1016/j.epidem.2018.06.001

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4509-4157