Niramai Oncho Dataset (Niramai Onchocerciasis/RiverBlindness Dataset)

Onchocerciasis is causing blindness in over half a million people in the world today. Drug development for the disease is crippled as there is no way of measuring effectiveness of the drug without an invasive procedure. Drug efficacy measurement through assessment of viability of onchocerca worms requires the patients to undergo nodulectomy which is invasive, expensive, time-consuming, skill-dependent, infrastructure dependent and lengthy process.

The motivation of Niramai Oncho Dataset is to develop algorithms that can detect Onchocerca worms non-invasively using thermal imaging. The dataset consists of both thermal images and videos captured for each nodule site during imaging of a participant. Histopathological confirmation of the presence of female adult worm is used to obtain the ground truth. In total, the dataset consists of 125 participants' data with 192 palpable nodules. Out of 192 palpable nodules, 101 correspond to live female nodules and the remain 91 correspond to dead nodules.