Abstract
Malaria is a disease caused by the plasmodium parasite and has caused many fatalities. In general, identifying malaria parasite infection can be done by visually observing thick and thin blood smears through microscopic devices. Identification of parasites in thick blood preparations has a higher level of difficulty than thin blood preparations. In thick blood preparations, various objects such as artefacts and noise have a structure similar to the structure of parasitic objects. This paper aims to develop a parasite detection method based on image processing in thick blood smears, consisting of two main stages. First is to improve image quality by applying contrast value stretching, converting green channels, and refining each image. Second is to segment the plasmodium parasite using global threshold Otsu and active contour followed by several morphological operations. The proposed method produces a high sensitivity of 98.06% with an average negative false rate of 1.4%. With the sensitivity level obtained, it can be interpreted that most of the parasitic objects have been detected correctly in one blood sample image.
Highlights
Malaria is a significant threat to health and has caused many deaths
An early diagnosis of malaria parasite infection in human blood is needed that can provide fast and accurate screening results according to World Health Organization (WHO) competency standards; this is very important to do because the results of the diagnosis can be used as the basis for taking appropriate medical action in the context of treating patients infected
This study obtained with an accuracy of 97.57%, false negative rate (FNR) of 12.04%, and false discovery rate (FDR) of 6.87%
Summary
Malaria is a significant threat to health and has caused many deaths. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), at least 219 million malaria cases in 2017, with 435,000 deaths [1]. Transmission of this disease occurs through the bite of a female Anopheles mosquito which causes the growth of parasites in human blood from the genus plasmodium [2]. Humans infected with malaria have the highest risk of death. One of the leading causes of death in malaria patients is the slow handling of parasitic infections, especially in areas that lack experts and inadequate facilities. An early diagnosis of malaria parasite infection in human blood is needed that can provide fast and accurate screening results according to WHO competency standards; this is very important to do because the results of the diagnosis can be used as the basis for taking appropriate medical action in the context of treating patients infected
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