Background and Objectives: The development in the technology have witnessed that there is a revival of interest in drug discovery from medicinal plants for treatment of the most destructive diseases. Our investigation characterizes the usage of digital image processing techniques in Matlab to process and analyze the antimicrobial effects of the selected herbal plants.
Methods: The first stage of our investigation involves the extraction of components with methanol from the selected three herbal plants- Solanum xanthocarpum, Solanum nigrum and Helianthus annuus by using soxhlet apparatus. These plant extracts were assayed for antimicrobial activity against 4 different bacterial and fungal species using disk diffusion method.
Results: Notable cell growth inhibitions were observed from the selected microbes. Solanum xanthocarpum exhibits better antibacterial properties on comparison to other two extracts. Solanum nigrum and Helianthus annuus exhibit better antifungal properties by being sensitive factor towards fungal medium. The obtained images were processed using color coding techniques to determine the activity of the extract by isolating the region of inhibition area. The region of inhibition was measured using matlab code and tabulation was compiled to compare the manually measured distances to the automated measurements.
Conclusions: The results provided evidence that the studied plant extracts might indeed be potential sources of natural antimicrobial agents and the introduction of an evaluation technique using image processing was shown to be suitable for the purpose of accurate measurements of zone of inhibition.