Evaluation of motility quality in ram sperm by using a novel open-source suite of algorithms

FRANCISCO BUCHELLY; LUCÍA ZALAZAR; JUAN IGNACIO PASTORE; ANA JOSEFA SOLER; ANDREINA CESARI ; VIRGINIA L. BALLARIN

Córdoba

Congreso; XXI Congreso Argentino de Bioingeniería y X Jornadas de Ingeniería Clínica - SABI 2017; 2017

Sociedad Argentina de Bioingeniería y la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales y la Facultad de Ciencias Médicas de la Universidad Nacional de Córdoba

In this paper a novel suit of open-source algorithms for sperm motility evaluation is presented. The proposed method first applies a segmentation, separating spermatozoa heads from the background in a binary image. Then, the mass center of each binary object is determined to develop a time tracking. The tracking stage is performed using individual Kalman filters to predict each particle position and a simplified occlusion handling method due to the low size of the particles. The system was compared with the Microptic?s Sperm Class Analyzer® according to the tracking performance, evaluating the precision of the system and the percentage of fragmented paths to measure the tracking reliability. Results show that the proposed method presented a better performance according to those indicators. Finally, motility percentages were found to corroborate the higher number of detected motile trajectories of our method.