Automated ABO Rh-D blood type detection using smartphone imaging for point-of-care medical diagnostics

• Published in: 2016 38th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC) Vol. 2016; pp. 4345 - 4348
• Main Authors: Srivathsa, Neha, Dendukuri, Dhananjaya
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.08.2016
• Subjects: ABO Blood-Group System - immunology; Algorithms; Antibodies - immunology; Automation; Blood; Blood Grouping and Crossmatching - instrumentation; Blood Grouping and Crossmatching - methods; Fabrics; Filtering; Humans; Image color analysis; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; Mobile handsets; Point-of-Care Systems; Rh-Hr Blood-Group System - immunology; Smartphone; Strips; Testing
• ISSN: 1557-170X
• DOI: 10.1109/EMBC.2016.7591689

We present a novel methodology for automated ABO Rh-D blood typing using simple morphological image processing algorithms to be used in conjunction with a fabric strip based rapid diagnostic test. Images of the fabric strip post testing are acquired using low cost mobile phones and the proposed algorithm proceeds to automatically identify the blood type by processing the images using steps comprising of noise reduction, range filtering and empirically derived heuristics. The ultimate goal is to provide a simple mobile phone application to enable automated, rapid and accessible blood type detection at the point-of-care.