HEAD is an image processing software developed to automatically identify and quantify

different species of helminth eggs (a source of many health risks associated with poor
sanitation) from conventional microscopy images taken from wastewater, soil, sludge,
biosolids, and excreta samples. It aims to aid in the analysis and control of these pathogens
of medical importance without the need for highly trained microbiologists that performed
the identification. At the same time, HEAD has the advantage of eliminating the main source
of errors that affect the reliability of helminth eggs detection, leading to more accurate
results and a better monitoring of the quality of different environmental samples as well as
the performance of treatment processes. As a result, the use of HEAD reduces analytical
costs, and render accessible to a wider community the promptly and reliably detection of
helminth eggs.
By performing several image-processing algorithms, the current version is capable of
identifying 11 species of helminth eggs, the most common in the environmental engineering
field, but the number of species may increase after further training. Once an image has been
processed, HEAD provides the total number of eggs as well as the individual number by
species, and for Ascaris lumbricoides it differentiates whether or not the egg is fertile.

Example of an actual wastewater image processed with HEAD.

Ex

Grupo Tratamiento y Reso, Instituto de Ingeniera UNAM.

Contact: bjimenezc@iingen.unam.mx; cmayar@iingen.unam.mx; jbarriosp@iingen.unam.mx