Jun 8 2024University of South Florida Ryan Carney, professor of integrative biology, and Sriram Chellappan, professor in the department of computer science and engineering, will collaborate with an interdisciplinary team of researchers to advance malaria research and explore innovative solutions to target malaria-infected mosquitoes in real-time.
Over the next five years, the international center will advance evidence-based strategies for malaria eradication and elimination, including training a new generation of African scientists, better understanding of insecticide resistance and investigating the geographic expansion of Anopheles stephensi, a dangerous urban malaria vector that has recently started to invade Africa.
Carney and Chellappan will lead the project's image-driven mosquito surveillance efforts by training local scientists how to leverage citizen science through mosquitodashboard.org, a global mosquito-tracking dashboard they created in 2022 with funding from the National Science Foundation.
We are the only team that we know of globally that can successfully enable anatomy-based classification from a single photo to identify mosquitoes. Our algorithm automatically identifies the head, thorax, abdomen and legs from a mosquito image, then it uses specific anatomical components to identify the mosquito type – for example, the wing for Anopheles stephensi.