Plasmodium Falciparum and Plasmodium Vivax Malaria Detection Using Image Processing and Multi-Class CNN Classifier

Millions of people suffer from malaria, one of the most serious parasitic diseases that threatens human life and causes high rates of morbidity and mortality, particularly in tropical and subtropical regions. Traditional diagnostic methods, such as blood smear examination, which can be performed using a microscope, face many challenges due to the inaccuracy of manual analysis and the reliance on individual skills. Therefore, the use of machine learning or deep learning algorithms to automate malaria detection offers promising solutions to improve accuracy, reduce diagnosis time, and enhance scalability. In this paper, a multi-class convolutional neural network (CNN)-based model is designed to classify cells infected with Plasmodium falciparum (P. falciparum) and Plasmodium vivax (P. vivax) and uninfected cells from blood smears, as most severe cases and deaths are caused by P. falciparum and P. vivax. This is achieved by building and training a CNN from scratch, rather than using transfer learning from pre-trained models. The proposed network was trained and tested on the Kaggle dataset, which consists of 27,558 images of infected and uninfected individuals. These images were divided into 13,779 images of uninfected individuals, 6,890 images of individuals with P. falciparum malaria, and 6,889 images of individuals with P. vivax malaria. The images were preprocessed using several operations, including blurring, denoising, and morphological processing. The proposed model achieved the best evaluation accuracy when compared with other deep learning algorithms, with an accuracy rate of 96.5%, a sensitivity rate of 95%, a specificity rate of 97.6%, and an F1-score rate of 96.5%. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model as a tool to assist clinicians in malaria diagnosis, reducing reliance on manual analysis.