AI learns how to recognise the species of splatted mosquitoes

Artificial intelligence trained to recognise both living and dead mosquitoes could help track the three species most responsible for transmitting disease.

Mosquitoes kill more people than any other animal because they can transmit diseases such as dengue, malaria and Zika virus fever. Using AI to automatically identify different mosquito species could make it easier to track their presence worldwide – but such an AI needs many images of mosquitoes to learn from.

Song-Quan Ong at the University Malaysia Sabah and Hamdan Ahmad at the University of Science, Malaysia, recruited three volunteers to help them image yellow fever mosquitoes (Aedes aegypti), Asian tiger mosquitoes (Aedes albopictus) and southern house mosquitoes (Culex quinquefasciatus). The researchers took two photos of each mosquito that landed on the volunteers’ hands: one right after it landed and another after it was splatted.

Some mosquitoes bit the volunteers before getting smashed, but others were killed before they got the chance. “We aim to create images that are similar to real life,” says Ong.

In total, the researchers took 1500 images, half of alive mosquitoes and half of those that had been splatted.

The pair then used this data set to train two different AIs to recognise mosquitoes on human skin. The better-performing AI could guess the correct species around 80 per cent of the time. Eventually, such an AI could end up powering a smartphone app that people can use to identify mosquitoes they encounter and that would help researchers track these insects.

There have been previous efforts to automatically identify mosquitoes. One research group trained an AI to classify 15 species of mosquito from across the world according to their sex, genus, species and strain. Another team trained an AI to identify 67 different species of mosquito. Each one built their own data set that could, in theory, be combined with the latest one.

“The more images available of mosquitoes the better,” says Jannelle Couret at the University of Rhode Island.