Abstract
New methods are needed to rapidly identify malaria parasites in blood smears. The coupling of a Focal Plane Array (FPA) infrared microscope system to a synchrotron light source at IRENI enables rapid molecular imaging at high spatial resolution. The technique, in combination with hyper-spectral processing, enables imaging and diagnosis of early stage malaria parasites at the single cell level in a blood smear. The method relies on the detection of distinct lipid signatures associated with the different stages of the malaria parasite and utilises resonant Mie extended multiplicative scatter correction to pre-process the spectra followed by full bandwidth image deconvolution to resolve the single cells. This work demonstrates the potential of focal plane technology to diagnose single cells in a blood smear. Brighter laboratory based infrared sources, optical refinements and higher sensitive detectors will soon see the emergence of focal plane array imaging in the clinical environment.
Highlights
New methods are needed to rapidly identify malaria parasites in blood smears
Rapid Diagnostic Tests (RDTs), which are based on capture of parasite antigens by monoclonal antibodies incorporated into a test strip, are easy to apply but are unable to quantify parasitemia.[6]
The Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectrum of P. falciparum-infected red blood cell shows bands mainly associated with protein, lipid, nucleic acids and haemozoin.[11]
Summary
The technique, in combination with hyper-spectral processing, enables imaging and diagnosis of early stage malaria parasites at the single cell level in a blood smear. The method relies on the detection of distinct lipid signatures associated with the different stages of the malaria parasite and utilises resonant Mie extended multiplicative scatter correction to pre-process the spectra followed by full bandwidth image deconvolution to resolve the single cells. This work demonstrates the potential of focal plane technology to diagnose single cells in a blood smear. The FTIR spectrum of P. falciparum-infected red blood cell shows bands mainly associated with protein, lipid, nucleic acids and haemozoin (malaria pigment).[11] Other optical spectroscopic techniques including Raman microscopy[12,13,14,15,16] and magneto-based technologies[5,17,18] have been applied to diagnose malaria. We demonstrate that the averaged spectrum from each single cell can be used to unequivocally to diagnose the stage of the parasite in a highly reproducible manner from independent trials
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