Malaria is one of the serious global health problem, causing widespread sufferings and deaths in various parts of the world. With the large number of cases diagnosed over the year, early detection and accurate diagnosis which facilitates prompt treatment is an essential requirement to control malaria. For centuries now, manual microscopic examination of blood slide remains the gold standard for malaria diagnosis. However, low contrast of the malaria and variable smears quality are some factors that may influence the accuracy of interpretation by microbiologists. In order to reduce this problem, this paper aims to investigate the performance of the proposed contrast enhancement techniques namely, modified global and modified linear contrast stretching as well as the conventional global and linear contrast stretching that have been applied on malaria images of P. vivax species. The results show that the proposed modified global and modified linear contrast stretching techniques have successfully increased the contrast of the parasites and the infected red blood cells compared to the conventional global and linear contrast stretching. Hence, the resultant images would become useful to microbiologists for identification of various stages and species of malaria.
Acanthamoeba spp. cause a corneal infection, Acanthamoeba keratitis (AK), and a cerebral infection, granulomatous amoebic encephalitis (GAE). Though aggressive chemotherapy has been able to kill the active trophozoite form of Acanthamoeba, the encysted form of this parasite has remained problematic to resist physiological concentrations of drugs. The emergence of encysted amoeba into active trophozoite form poses a challenge to eradicate this parasite. Acanthamoeba trophozoites have active metabolic machinery that furnishes energy in the form of ATPs by subjecting carbohydrates and lipids to undergo pathways including glycolysis and beta-oxidation of free fatty acids, respectively. However, very little is known about the metabolic preferences and dependencies of an encysted trophozoite on minerals or potential nutrients that it consumes to live in an encysted state. Here, we investigate the metabolic and nutrient preferences of the encysted trophozoite of Acanthamoeba castellanii and the possibility to target them by drugs that act on calcium ion dependencies of the encysted amoeba. The experimental assays, immunostaining coupled with bioinformatics tools show that the encysted Acanthamoeba uses diverse nutrient pathways to obtain energy in the quiescent encysted state. These findings highlight potential pathways that can be targeted in eradicating amoebae cysts successfully.