Classification of malaria cell images with deep learning architectures

Abstract

Malaria is a contagious disease caused by the infection of erythrocytes by Plasmodium parasites, which are transmitted to human by parasitic female anopheles’ mosquitoes during feeding. Malaria is a type of infection that can be fatal if left untreated. It is very important to classify malaria virus images quickly and accurately using computer-aided systems. Because there are not enough personnel in each health unit to perform this procedure, traditional methods are both time consuming and open to errors. Once malaria images have been classified, it will be easier to diagnose malaria virus related diseases. Multiple methods have been developed to process large amounts of data. In particular, deep learning methods are frequently used for classification. In this paper, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been used to classify malaria images as healthy and parasited. Then, medium filter and gauss filter are applied to the original dataset. When classifying malaria data, the highest accuracy rate is achieved in the DenseNet201 architecture with gaussian filtered data of 97.83%. It is observed that the result obtained with the preprocessed data are higher. The application is implemented in the Matlab environment and works independently of the size of the images in the data set. © 2020 International Information and Engineering Technology Association. All rights reserved.