GeoVin: public participation in the fight against Chagas disease

COCHERO, J; PATTORI, LORENZO; BALSALOBRE, A; CECCARELLI, S; MARTI GA

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Conferencia; European Citizen Science Association Conference - Trieste Italy; 2020

In Geovin we gather information about the distribution of ?kissing bugs? (triatomines), that include a vector species of the parasite that causes Chagas disease. The GeoVin app has over 700 registered citizen scientists in Argentina; with the information gathered through this tool, we used a machine-learning approach to train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to recognize true kissing bugs directly from photos taken with cellphone cameras. The CNN reached correct identification rates of 94%, identifying true kissing bugs from other insects even with blurred images, poor lighting or with the presence of other objects in the photo.