Captive environments trigger the propagation and multiplication of parasites among different reptile species, thus weakening their immune response and causing infections and diseases. Technological advances of convolutional neural networks have opened a new field for detecting and classifying diseases which have shown great potential to overcome the shortcomings of manual detection performed by experts. Therefore, we propose an approach to identify six captive reptiles parasitic agents ( Ophionyssus natricis, Blastocystis sp, Oxiurdo egg, Rhytidoides similis, Strongyloides, Taenia) from a microscope stool images dataset. Towards this end, we first use an image segmentation stage to detect the parasite within the image, which combines the Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization (CLAHE) technique, the OTSU binarization method, and morphological operations. Then, we carry out a classification stage through Mobilenet CNN under a transfer learning scheme. This method was validated on a stool image dataset containing 3616 images data samples and 26 videos from the six parasites mentioned above. The results obtained indicate that our transfer learning-based approach can learn a helpful representation from the dataset. We obtained an average accuracy of 98.66% across the six parasitic agent classes, which statistically outperformed, at a 95% confidence level, a custom CNN trained from scratch.
When Vincent Nava became the first Mexican American to play professional baseball in the United States in 1882, it forced the sport to reckon with the place of individuals who did not fit neatly into the Black/white color line it had recently imposed, questioning if an ethnically Latin player should participate in a profession designated by and for white men. For Nava and his team, baseball became a way to experiment with whiteness and its corresponding characteristics of masculinity, social mobility, and identity. Nava's experiences mirrored those of many other Mexican Americans in their pursuit of equality and whiteness as a strategy to deter racial hostilities and to gain access to segregated spaces. Nava's attempts to circumnavigate the color line and the continuous negotiation of his identity within the sport provide critical insights to help deepen our understanding of the fluidity of the race-making process, how non-white populations resisted oppression, and how sports can enrich those conversations.
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