Flies species recognition for maggot therapy using neural-expert technique

Abstract

Maggot Debridement Therapy (MDT) has been recognized as one of the effective alternative treatment to enhance healing and to decrease the mortality associated with underlying injury. One of the most important procedures in performing MDT is to use the correct maggot from suitable species. In this case, maggots from the incorrect species would consume the live tissue instead of the dead tissue. Hence, this is highlighted as one of the difficulties in implementing MDT. Currently the process of identifying flies is done manually by experts or by using DNA traits. We explored and developed another procedure to recognize the species using hybrid neuro-expert technique. The percentage of correctness using standard back propagation neural network yields 94.4% accuracy. By adapting the neuro-expert technique, the prototype accuracy is 100%.