Automatic analysis of cos-7 binding assay imagery for malaria vaccination experiments

The cos-7 binding assay experiment is one of the most prominent tests in the context of developing vaccinations against malaria. The objective is to measure the amount of red blood cells sticking to modified monkeys' kidney cells if a relevant protein of the malaria parasite was set free by the cells. Current evaluation of this process is based on the manual assessment of an image doublet consisting of a green fluorescent image and a so-called phase image. Since the process is highly repetitive and time consuming, this paper proposes an automated evaluation process using a multi-stage approach with cross-referencing between the two images. In summary, the proposed method achieves a precision in kidney cells classification of more than 90%, while the cell counting accuracy was measured to achieve 80%. However, a systematic underestimation was observed and, hence, a more accurate estimate can be extrapolated.