Diagnosis of Malaria Infected Blood Cell Digital Images using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

Automated medical diagnosis is an important topic, especially in detection and classification of diseases. Malaria is one of the most widespread diseases, with more than 200 million cases, according to the 2016 WHO report. Malaria is usually diagnosed using thin and thick blood smears under a microscope. However, proper diagnosis is difficult, especially in poor countries where the disease is most widespread. Therefore, automatic diagnostics helps in identifying the disease through images of red blood cells, with the use of machine learning techniques and digital image processing. This paper presents an accurate model using a Deep Convolutional Neural Network build from scratch. The paper also proposed three CNN models each one trained on the Malaria RBC dataset with different architectures for handling the classification tasks. Furthermore, disadvantage of the traditional method of using transfer learning, and how to control model complexity to achieve better performance was discussed. The dropout regularization technique was used to avoid overfitting problems and minimize validation loss. Applying Data Augmentation technique to avoid the problem of small data in training of proposed models, which is a very common problem in medical dataset. Finally, removing noise in Malaria images using a Median blur filter, and studying how effects of that on training CNN models. According to the classification results, the proposed model achieved better classification results at accuracy 99.22 on the original Malaria RBCs dataset, and it has the best performance comparing with related work.