Abstract

The easily transmitted Tuberculosis (TB) disease is attributed to the fact that Mycobacterium Tuberculosis (MTB) bacteria/viruses can be transmitted through the air. One of the methods to screen the TB disease is by reading sputum slides. Sputum slides are colored sputum samples of TB patients placed on microscopic slides. However, TB disease microscopic analysis has some limitations since it requires high accuracy reading and well-trained health personnel to avoid errors in the process of interpretation. Furthermore, the number of TB patients in the Primary Health Care (PHC) and the process of manual calculation of bacteria in a field of view often complicate the decision-making in the screening process conducted by the medical staffs. In this paper, the researchers propose the use of Watershed Transformation and Fuzzy C-Means combination to help solve the problem. The researchers collect the photo shooting of three PHC in Indonesia with 55 images of sputum from different TB patients. The assessed results of the proposed method are compared with the opinions of three Microbiology doctors. The comparison shows Cohen's Kappa Coefficient value of 0.838. It suggests that the proposed method can detect Acid Resistant Bacteria (ARB) although it needs some improvement to achieve higher accuracy.