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Cutaneous Leishmaniasis is a skin infection which is commonly present in underdeveloped countries. The incidence is particularly high in amazonic countries of Latin-America like Brazil, Colombia and Perú and is usually reported as endemic. In Perú, more than one million people are at risk of infection and approximately 6,000 new cases are detected each year. The present work proposes to integrate a set of control, monitoring and disease quantification procedures in: (1) an automated tool to expedite the analysis in laboratories studying parasiticidal agents and (2) a non-invasive treatment monitoring protocol. The first, consists in the adaptation of an optical microscope KRUSS MBL3100 to perform a fast image capture and automated promastigotes identification. This may be of value to evaluate the effectiveness of various parasiticidal agents. The counting process is performed by an automatic segmentation in the RGB green color space discriminating elements by their area. The second, proposes a protocol for monitoring the evolution of the disease treatment divided into three stages: supra-skin modeling and reconstruction, subcutaneous exploration by textural characteristics and volumetric segmentation. This protocol is performed using a Next Engine HD 3D scanner and a Vevo Visualsonix 2100 ultrasonic scanner. The results show improvements in sample processing time, accuracy and inter- and intra-operational variability. The sensitivity and accuracy of the microscopic identification system was of 97% and 92% respectively. The exactitude and precision error was up to 2% and the sensitivity and specificity went as high as 71% in the 3D reconstruction and texture analysis respectively.

Medical ultrasound has proven to be superior to other imaging modalities while scanning underserved areas. Compared to the alternatives, it is fast, safe, portable, and inexpensive. The objective of the present work is to assess the performance of a newly designed, portable, low cost and network-ready ultrasonic imaging device which can be taken to rural and underserved locations for medical diagnostic and screening: SonicCare. First, a brief description of its advantages and a comparison against two commercial ultrasonography devices while scanning a tissue mimicking phantom is presented and discussed. For experimental quality assurance, the dead zone, spatial measurement calibration, spatial resolution, functional resolution and dynamic range were tested while scanning an ATS 539 multipurpose rubber based phantom. Also, clinical image quality tests were performed on two local and one rural health services facilities. Measured dimensions and image based screening on liver, gallbladder and kidney were performed. To assess the correlation between devices' measurements, the Bland-Altman method was used. The experimental quality assurance tests revealed a mean measurement error of 4.7% and a coefficient of variability of 5% while the clinical imaging test revealed that the cross-correlation precision against a clinical non-portable device was ±8.5 mm.