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New Vector Control Tools: UAS and Artificial Intelligance

New Vector Control Tools: UAS and Artificial Intelligance

294 - Technical progress of Scout, an imaging attachment using artificial intelligence for remote automated assessment of vector abundance and species diversity in mosquito traps

Thursday, March 6, 2025
2:45 PM – 2:55 PM AST
Location: 202
Abstract: Vector surveillance is critical to understanding mosquito abundance, species diversity, and distribution. When fast and reliable surveillance data is available, mosquito control programs can effectively optimize interventions and assess impact. Unfortunately, conventional surveillance programs require significant labor, taxonomic expertise, and logistics to deploy traps on a daily basis, retrieve specimens, and sort, identify, and record specimen data. Recent advancements of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms known as convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have enabled image recognition tools, such as Vectech’s IDX, to augment species identification in the lab. This presentation reports on the translation of such AI imaging systems to a tool called Scout designed to attach to mosquito traps. Scout immobilizes and images mosquitoes as they enter a trap, extracts abundance and species data from the images, and transmits the information to a web dashboard in real time. This presentation will describe updates to the design, initial lab test results, attractivity results in semi field settings, and preliminary results on the computer vision algorithms for specimen detection and species identification.