Department of Public Health and Health Promotion, College of Allied Health Sciences, Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University, Bangkok, Thailand.
Department of Parasitology, Phramongkutklao College of Medicine, Bangkok, Thailand.
Exp Parasitol. 2022 Jul;238:108281. doi: 10.1016/j.exppara.2022.108281. Epub 2022 May 18.
Copro-microscopic diagnostic methods are the most common approach for screening patients with parasitic infections. However, expertise is required to identify helminthic eggs from fecal specimens. Consequently, new methods are required to support accurate species identification. Novel technologies have recently been developed for the classification of organisms, including geometric morphometric (GM) approaches. In this study, the outline-based GM approach was used to distinguish the eggs of 12 common human parasite species, including Ascaris lumbricoides, Trichuris trichiura, Enterobius vermicularis, hookworm, Capillaria philippinensis, Opisthorchis spp., Fasciola spp., Paragonimus spp., Schistosoma mekongi, Taenia spp., Hymenolepis diminuta and Hymenolepis nana. The GM analysis revealed that the size cannot be used as the main variable in the identification of parasite species at the egg stage, producing only 30.18% overall accuracy. However, comparisons of shape based on the Mahalanobis distances between pairs of parasite species showed significant differences in all pairs (p < 0.05). The shape analysis produced 84.29% overall accuracy. This is the first time that outline-based GM has been preliminarily confirmed as a valuable approach to support copro-microscopic analysis, in order to effectively screen helminth eggs. However, further studies with a larger set of helminth eggs and artefacts should be carried out to increase confidence in the identification of parasite species in the absence of local experts.
粪便显微镜诊断方法是筛查寄生虫感染患者最常用的方法。然而，从粪便样本中识别蠕虫卵需要专业知识。因此，需要新的方法来支持准确的物种鉴定。最近已经开发出一些新技术来对生物进行分类，包括几何形态测量（GM）方法。在这项研究中，采用基于轮廓的 GM 方法来区分 12 种常见人体寄生虫卵，包括蛔虫、鞭虫、蛲虫、钩虫、菲律宾毛细线虫、麝猫后睾吸虫、片形吸虫、并殖吸虫、湄公血吸虫、带绦虫、微小膜壳绦虫和微小膜壳绦虫。GM 分析表明，在卵期鉴定寄生虫物种时，大小不能作为主要变量，总体准确率仅为 30.18%。然而，基于成对寄生虫物种之间马氏距离的形状比较显示所有对之间均存在显著差异（p<0.05）。形状分析的总体准确率为 84.29%。这是首次初步证实基于轮廓的 GM 是一种有价值的方法，可以支持粪便显微镜分析，以有效筛选蠕虫卵。然而，应该进行更多的带有更大样本集的蠕虫卵和人工制品的研究，以在没有当地专家的情况下提高对寄生虫物种鉴定的信心。
