Sputum Smears Quality Inspection Using an Ensemble Feature Extraction Approach

The diagnosis of tuberculosis (TB) is extremely important. Sputum smear microscopy is thought to be the best method available in terms of accessibility and ease of use in resource-constrained countries. In this paper, research was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of tuberculosis diagnosis by examining, among other things, the underlying causes of sputum smear quality for Ethiopian states such as Tigray, Amahira, and Oromia. However, because it is done manually, it has its limitations. This study proposes a model for sputum smear quality inspection using an ensemble feature extraction approach. The dataset used was recorded and labeled by experts in a regional lab in Bahir Dar, near Felege Hiwot Hospital after being collected from Gabi Hospital, Felege Hiwot Hospital, Adit Clinic and Gondar Hospital, as well as Kidanemihret Clinic in Gondar. We used a controlled environment to reduce environmental influences and eliminate variation. All the data was collected using a smartphone (the standard 15) with a jpg file extension and a pixel resolution of 1,728 × 3,840. Prior to feature extraction, bicubic resizing, and ROI extraction using thresholding was performed. In addition, sequential Gaussian and Gabor filters were used for noise reduction, augmentation, and CLAHE was used for enhancement. For feature extraction, GLCM from the gray label and CNN from the color image were both chosen. Ultimately, when CNN, SVM, and KNN classifiers were used to test both CNN and GLCM features, KNN outperformed them all with scores of 87, 93, and 94% for GLCM, CNN, and a hybrid of CNN and GLCM, respectively. CNN with GLCM outperformed other methods by 0.7 and 0.1% for GLCM and CNN feature extractors using the same classifier, respectively. In addition, the KNN classifier with the combination of CNN and GLCM as feature extractors performed better than existing methods by 1.48%.