Abstract
Malaria is an endemic life-threating disease caused by the unicellular protozoan parasites of the genus Plasmodium. Confirming the presence of parasites early in all malaria cases ensures species-specific antimalarial treatment, reducing the mortality rate, and points to other illnesses in negative cases. However, the gold standard remains the light microscopy of May-Grünwald–Giemsa (MGG)-stained thin and thick peripheral blood (PB) films. This is a time-consuming procedure, dependent on a pathologist’s skills, meaning that healthcare providers may encounter difficulty in diagnosing malaria in places where it is not endemic. This work presents a novel three-stage pipeline to (1) segment erythrocytes, (2) crop and mask them, and (3) classify them into malaria infected or not. The first and third steps involved the design, training, validation and testing of a Segmentation Neural Network and a Convolutional Neural Network from scratch using a Graphic Processing Unit. Segmentation achieved a global accuracy of 93.72% over the test set and the specificity for malaria detection in red blood cells (RBCs) was 87.04%. This work shows the potential that deep learning has in the digital pathology field and opens the way for future improvements, as well as for broadening the use of the created networks.
Highlights
In 2018, an estimated 228 million cases of malaria occurred worldwide, causing 405,000 deaths according to the World Health Organization (WHO) [1]
The novel pipeline presented in this work shows a global segmentation accuracy for red blood cells (RBCs) of 93.72% and a specificity for malaria detection of 87.04%
The automation of malaria detection in peripheral blood (PB) smear digital images has often been addressed within the usual machine learning learning (ML) framework: preprocessing, segmentation, feature extraction and classification [9]
Summary
In 2018, an estimated 228 million cases of malaria occurred worldwide, causing 405,000 deaths according to the World Health Organization (WHO) [1]. Malaria is one of the major global public health challenges and a life-threatening disease [2,3]. It is a parasitic disease caused by the unicellular protozoan parasites of the genus Plasmodium. The risk of transmission exists in over 100 countries and territories in both tropical and subtropical areas [2,6] These areas are yearly visited by over 125 million international travelers [2], and malaria is imported to non-endemic areas like Europe. Between 120 and 180 cases are registered annually in Spain [6]
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