Automatic detection of Plasmodium parasites from microscopic blood images

Malaria is caused by Plasmodium parasite. It is transmitted by female Anopheles bite. Thick and thin blood smears of the patient are manually examined by an expert pathologist with the help of a microscope to diagnose the disease. Such expert pathologists may not be available in many parts of the world due to poor health facilities. Moreover, manual inspection requires full concentration of the pathologist and it is a tedious and time consuming way to detect the malaria. Therefore, development of automated systems is momentous for a quick and reliable detection of malaria. It can reduce the false negative rate and it can help in detecting the disease at early stages where it can be cured effectively. In this paper, we present a computer aided design to automatically detect malarial parasite from microscopic blood images. The proposed method uses bilateral filtering to remove the noise and enhance the image quality. Adaptive thresholding and morphological image processing algorithms are used to detect the malaria parasites inside individual cell. To measure the efficiency of the proposed algorithm, we have tested our method on a NIH Malaria dataset and also compared the results with existing similar methods. Our method achieved the detection accuracy of more than 91% outperforming the competing methods. The results show that the proposed algorithm is reliable and can be of great assistance to the pathologists and hematologists for accurate malaria parasite detection.