A Fuzzy Strategy to Eliminate Uncertainty in Grading Positive Tuberculosis

Abstract

Sputum smear microscopic examination is an effective, fast, and low-cost technique that is highly specific in areas with a high prevalence of pulmonary tuberculosis. Since manual screening needs trained pathologist in high prevalence zones, the possibility of deploying adequate technicians during the epidemic sessions would be impractical. This condition can cause overburdening and fatigue of working technicians which may tend to reduce the potential efficiency of Tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis. Hence, automation of sputum inspection is the most appropriate aspect in TB outbreak zones to maximize the detection ability. Sputum collection, smear preparing, staining, interpreting smears, and reporting of TB severity are all part of the diagnosis of tuberculosis. This study has analyzed the risk of automating TB severity grading. According to the findings of the analysis, numerous TB-positive cases do not fit into the standard TB severity grade while applying direct rule-driven strategy. The manual investigation, on the other hand, arbitrarily labels the TB grade on those cases. To counter the risk of automation, a fuzzy-based Tuberculosis Severity Level Categorizing Algorithm (TSLCA) is introduced to eliminate uncertainty in classifying the level of TB infection. TSLCA introduces the weight factors, which are dependent on the existence of maximum number of Acid-Fast Bacilli (AFB) per microscopic Field of View (FOV). The fuzzification and defuzzification operations are carried out using the triangular membership function. In addition, the [Formula: see text]-cut approach is used to eliminate the ambiguity in TB severity grading. Several uncertain TB microscopy screening reports are tested using the proposed TSLCA. Based on the experimental results, it is observed that the TB grading by TSLCA is consistent, error-free, significant and fits exactly into the standard criterion. As a result of the proposed TSLCA, the uncertainty of grading is eliminated and the reliability of tuberculosis diagnosis is ensured when adapting automatic diagnosis.