Hybrid-biomarker case-based reasoning system for water pollution assessment in Abou Hammad Sharkia, Egypt

•This paper presents an automatic system based on biomarker for assessing water quality.•The proposed system utilized case-based reasoning for indicating the degree of water quality.•Water quality is classified based on the histopathological changes in fish gills and liver.•Performance evaluation metrics are retrieval accuracy, receiver operating receiver (ROC) curves, F-measure, and G-mean.•That proposed CBR based system has obtained water quality classification accuracy of 97.9%.

Water pollution by organic materials or metals is one of the problems that threaten humanity, both nowadays and over the next decades. Morphological changes in Nile Tilapia “Oreochromis niloticus” fish liver and gills can also represent the adaptation strategies to maintain some physiological functions or to assess acute and chronic exposure to chemicals found in water and sediments. This paper presents an automatic system for assessing water quality, in Sharkia Governorate – Egypt, based on microscopic images of fish gills and liver. The proposed system used fish gills and liver as hybrid-biomarker in order to detect water pollution. It utilized case-based reasoning (CBR) for indicating the degree of water quality based on the different histopathological changes in fish gills and liver microscopic images. Various performance evaluation metrics namely, retrieval accuracy, receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, F-measure, and G-mean have been used in order to objectively indicate the true performance of the system considering the unbalanced data. Experimental results showed that the proposed hybrid-biomarker CBR based system achieved water quality prediction accuracy of 97.9% using cosine distance similarity measure. Also, it outperformed both SVMs and LDA classifiers for the tested microscopic images dataset.

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