The malaria system microApp: A new, mobile device-based tool for malaria diagnosis

Background: Malaria is a public health problem that affects remote areas worldwide. Climate change has contributed to the problem by allowing for the survival of Anopheles in previously uninhabited areas. As such, several groups have made developing news systems for the automated diagnosis of malaria a priority. Objective: The objective of this study was to develop a new, automated, mobile device-based diagnostic system for malaria. The system uses Giemsa-stained peripheral blood samples combined with light microscopy to identify the Plasmodium falciparum species in the ring stage of development. Methods: The system uses image processing and artificial intelligence techniques as well as a known face detection algorithm to identify Plasmodium parasites. The algorithm is based on integral image and haar-like features concepts, and makes use of weak classifiers with adaptive boosting learning. The search scope of the learning algorithm is reduced in the preprocessing step by removing the background around blood cells. Results: As a proof of concept experiment, the tool was used on 555 malaria-positive and 777 malaria-negative previously-made slides. The accuracy of the system was, on average, 91%, meaning that for every 100 parasite-infected samples, 91 were identified correctly. Conclusions: Accessibility barriers of low-resource countries can be addressed with low-cost diagnostic tools. Our system, developed for mobile devices (mobile phones and tablets), addresses this by enabling access to health centers in remote communities, and importantly, not depending on extensive malaria expertise or expensive diagnostic detection equipment.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Erythrocyte Features for Malaria Parasite Detection in Microscopic Images of Thin Blood Smear: A Review

Microscopic image analysis of blood smear plays a very important role in characterization of erythrocytes in screening of malaria parasites. The characteristics feature of erythrocyte changes due to malaria parasite infection. The microscopic features of the erythrocyte include morphology, intensity and texture. In this paper, the different features used to differentiate the non- infected and malaria infected erythrocyte have been reviewed

Review of Microscopic Image Processing techniques towards Malaria Infected Erythrocyte Detection from Thin Blood Smears

In order to diagnose malaria, the test that has traditionally been conducted is the gold standard test. The process mainly entails the preparation of a blood smear on glass slide, staining the blood and examining the blood through the use of a microscope so as to observe parasite genus plasmodium. Although these are several other kinds of diagnostic test solutions that are available and which can be adopted, there are numerous shortcomings which are always observed when microscopic analysis is carried out. Presently, the treatments are hugely conducted based on symptoms and upon the occurrence of false negatives, it might be fatal and may result into the creation of different kinds of implications. There have been a number of deaths which have been associated with malaria and as a result, there is the dire need to ensure that there is early detection of malarial infection among the people. This manuscript mainly provides a review of the current contributions regarding computer aided strategies, as well as microscopic image processing strategies for the detection of malaria. They are discussed based on the contemporary literature

Automated Low-Cost Malaria Detection System in Thin Blood Slide Images Using Mobile Phones

Malaria, a deadly disease which according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) is responsible for the fatal illness in 200 million people around the world in 2010, is diagnosed using peripheral blood examination. The work undertaken in this research programme aims to develop an automated malaria parasite-detection system, using microscopic-image processing, that can be incorporated onto mobile phones. In this research study, the main objective is to achieve the performance equal to or better than the manual microscopy, which is the gold standard in malaria diagnosis, in order to produce a reliable automated diagnostic platform without expert intervention, for the effective treatment and eradication of the deadly disease. The work contributed to the field of mathematical morphology by proposing a novel method called the Annular Ring Ratio transform for blood component identification. It has also proposed an automated White Blood Cell and Red Blood Cell differentiation algorithm, which when combined with ARR transform method, has wide applications not only for malaria diagnosis but also for many blood related analysis involving microscopic examination. The research has undertaken investigations on infected cell identification which aids in the calculation of parasitemia, the measure of infection. In addition, an automated diagnostic tool to detect the sexual stage (gametocytes) of the species P.falciparum for post-treatment malaria diagnosis was developed. Furthermore, a parallel investigation was carried out on automated malaria diagnosis on fluorescent thin blood films and a WBC and infected cell differentiation algorithm was proposed. Finally, a mobile phone application based on the morphological image processing algorithms proposed in this thesis was developed. A complete malaria diagnostic unit using the mobile phones attached to a portable microscope was set up which has enormous potential not only for malaria diagnosis but also for the blood parasitological field where advancement in medical diagnostics using cellular smart phone technology is widely acknowledged

A Review on the Applications of Crowdsourcing in Human Pathology

The advent of the digital pathology has introduced new avenues of diagnostic medicine. Among them, crowdsourcing has attracted researchers' attention in the recent years, allowing them to engage thousands of untrained individuals in research and diagnosis. While there exist several articles in this regard, prior works have not collectively documented them. We, therefore, aim to review the applications of crowdsourcing in human pathology in a semi-systematic manner. We firstly, introduce a novel method to do a systematic search of the literature. Utilizing this method, we, then, collect hundreds of articles and screen them against a pre-defined set of criteria. Furthermore, we crowdsource part of the screening process, to examine another potential application of crowdsourcing. Finally, we review the selected articles and characterize the prior uses of crowdsourcing in pathology

Computer vision for microscopy diagnosis of malaria

This paper reviews computer vision and image analysis studies aiming at automated diagnosis or screening of malaria infection in microscope images of thin blood film smears. Existing works interpret the diagnosis problem differently or propose partial solutions to the problem. A critique of these works is furnished. In addition, a general pattern recognition framework to perform diagnosis, which includes image acquisition, pre-processing, segmentation, and pattern classification components, is described. The open problems are addressed and a perspective of the future work for realization of automated microscopy diagnosis of malaria is provided

A Systematic Review on Automatic Detection of Plasmodium Parasite

Plasmodium parasite is the main cause of malaria which has taken many lives. Some research works have been conducted to detect the Plasmodium parasite automatically. This research aims to identify the development of current research in the area of Plasmodium parasite detection. The research uses a systematic literature review (SLR) approach comprising three stages, namely planning, conducting, and reporting. The search process is based on the keywords which were determined in advance. The selection process involves the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The search yields 45 literatures from five different digital libraries. The identification process finds out that 28 methods are applied and mainly categorizes as machine learning algorithms with performance achievements between 60% and 95%. Overall, the research of Plasmodium parasite detection today has focused on the development with artificial intelligence specifically related to machine and deep learning. These approaches are believed as the most effective approach to detect Plasmodium parasites

A switched-beam antenna for cellular communication

Wireless communication has created a continuing demand for increased bandwidth and better quality of services. Smart antenna arrays are one of the ways to accommodate this demand which can provide numerous benefits to service provider and the customer. Switched-beam antenna was chosen for this project due to its easier implementation and lower cost compared to adaptive array. Switched-beam antenna is one of smart antenna technique which comprises a number of predefined beams. The control system switches among the beams that provide the maximum signal response. Through the investigation and study on this system, found that, the 1200 sectorization with three monopole antenna elements suited for prototype construction. The initial stage to design this system is by using MA TLAB simulation to identify the antenna characteristic and the parameters involved. The second stage is about the construction of the prototype switched-beam antenna used to measure the antenna gain and relative power level which displayed using CASSY program