Fast and accurate automated recognition of the dominant cells from fecal images based on Faster R-CNN

Fecal samples can easily be collected and are representative of a person’s current health state; therefore, the demand for routine fecal examination has increased sharply. However, manual operation may pollute the samples, and low efficiency limits the general examination speed; therefore, automatic analysis is needed. Nevertheless, recognition exhaustion time and accuracy remain major challenges in automatic testing. Here, we introduce a fast and efficient cell-detection algorithm based on the Faster-R-CNN technique: the Resnet-152 convolutional neural network architecture. Additionally, a region proposal network and a network combined with principal component analysis are proposed for cell location and recognition in microscopic images. Our algorithm achieved a mean average precision of 84% and a 723 ms detection time per sample for 40,560 fecal images. Thus, this approach may provide a solid theoretical basis for real-time detection in routine clinical examinations while accelerating the process to satisfy increasing demand.