Parasite detection and identification for automated thin blood film malaria diagnosis

Abstract

This paper investigates automated detection and identification of malaria parasites in images of Giemsa-stained thin blood film specimens. The Giemsa stain highlights not only the malaria parasites but also the white blood cells, platelets, and artefacts. We propose a complete framework to extract these stained structures, determine whether they are parasites, and identify the infecting species and life-cycle stages. We investigate species and life-cycle-stage identification as multi-class classification problems in which we compare three different classification schemes and empirically show that the detection, species, and life-cycle-stage tasks can be performed in a joint classification as well as an extension to binary detection. The proposed binary parasite detector can operate at 0.1% parasitemia without any false detections and with less than 10 false detections at levels as low as 0.01%.