YOLO-Tryppa: A Novel YOLO-Based Approach for Rapid and Accurate Detection of Small Trypanosoma Parasites

Mura D. A.

;Zedda L.

;Loddo A.

;Di Ruberto C.

2025-01-01

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Abstract

Early detection of Trypanosoma parasites is critical for the prompt treatment of trypanosomiasis, a neglected tropical disease that poses severe health and socioeconomic challenges in affected regions. To address the limitations of traditional manual microscopy and prior automated methods, we propose YOLO-Tryppa, a novel YOLO-based framework specifically engineered for the rapid and accurate detection of small Trypanosoma parasites in microscopy images. YOLO-Tryppa incorporates ghost convolutions to reduce computational complexity while maintaining robust feature extraction and introduces a dedicated P2 prediction head to improve the localization of small objects. By eliminating the redundant P5 prediction head, the proposed approach achieves a significantly lower parameter count and reduced GFLOPs. Experimental results on the public Tryp dataset demonstrate that YOLO-Tryppa outperforms the previous state of the art by achieving an AP50 of 71.3%, thereby setting a new benchmark for both accuracy and efficiency. These improvements make YOLO-Tryppa particularly well-suited for deployment in resource-constrained settings, facilitating more rapid and reliable diagnostic practices.