Isolation, Detection and Estimation of Microscopic Worms by

In our work I have developed an measuring and counting procedure using image processing and picture analyses that is easy to use and requires very few calibrations. It takes about two minutes to obtain five pictures of Nematodes and to manually sort these pictures in a normal directory tree on the computer. It then takes about two minutes for the program to analyze these images, count and measure all the individuals in these populations and save the data in distinct files (20 to 30 sec per set of 5 pictures on a 2.5 GHz computer). Altogether about five minutes are needed to take a count of one hundred laboratory populations, whose densities can reach a hundred individuals. One of the major improvements would be to use color pictures instead of black and white ones. This method is efficient at removing most of the motionless background and to correct for spatially heterogeneous lighting conditions.