A user-friendly software to easily count Anopheles egg batches

Abstract

BackgroundStudies on malaria vector ecology and development/evaluation of vector control strategies often require measures of mosquito life history traits. Assessing the fecundity of malaria vectors can be carried out by counting eggs laid by Anopheles females. However, manually counting the eggs is time consuming, tedious, and error prone.MethodsIn this paper we present a newly developed software for high precision automatic egg counting. The software written in the Java programming language proposes a user-friendly interface and a complete online manual. It allows the inspection of results by the operator and includes proper tools for manual corrections. The user can in fact correct any details on the acquired results by a mouse click. Time saving is significant and errors due to loss of concentration are avoided.ResultsThe software was tested over 16 randomly chosen images from 2 different experiments. The results show that the proposed automatic method produces results that are close to the ground truth.ConclusionsThe proposed approaches demonstrated a very high level of robustness. The adoption of the proposed software package will save many hours of labor to the bench scientist. The software needs no particular configuration and is freely available for download on: http://w3.ualg.pt/∼hshah/eggcounter/.

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“…At 72 hours post-feeding, thirty females from each group were randomly selected and placed individually in inverted petri dishes containing moist filter paper for oviposition [ 17 ]. The total number of eggs laid by each female (fecundity) was counted using EggCounter V 1.0 [ 18 ]. The number of hatched eggs from each female (fertility) was counted with the aid of a stereomicroscope.…”

Efficacy of Olyset®Duo, a permethrin and pyriproxyfen mixture net against wild pyrethroid-resistantAnopheles gambiae s.s.from Côte d’Ivoire: an experimental hut trial

“…Females in cardboard cups were maintained with honey solution at 28 °C and 80% RH for 5 days before checking mortality. A picture of each filter paper was taken to count the eggs using egg counter software [ 13 ]. All eggs from the control and treated batches were immersed in water.…”

Large-scale Anopheles arabiensis egg quantification methods for mass-rearing operations

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