High Magnification Z-Stacks from Blood Films

All biological samples were collected from participants recruited under the auspices of the CMRG at the 800-bed tertiary hospital, UCH in the city of Ibadan, Nigeria, after after de-identification of the patient information. We trained and tested the CAMI-Fusion network on three different types of samples: (a) Giemsa-stained thick blood films (TBF) and (b) Giemsa-stained peripheral blood smears (PBS) for malaria parasite detection as well as (c) Wright-stained Bone Marrow Aspirates (BMA) for diagnosing blood cancers.

Image acquisition and pre-processing:

We used an upright brightfield microscope (BX63, Olympus, 100W halogen bulb light source) with a 100X/1.4NA oil immersion objective (MPlanApoN, Olympus) and a color digital camera (Edge 5.5C, PCO) to acquire multiple high-resolution z-stacks with an axial step of a 0.5 µm. White balancing was applied to each focal plane image. For each sample acquisition, an empty field of view (empty region of the slide not containing any blood cells) was acquired and considered as a white object reference.