11 V May 2023

https://doi.org/10.22214/ijraset.2023.52306
 International Journal for Research in Applied Science & Engineering Technology (IJRASET)
ISSN: 2321-9653; IC Value: 45.98; SJ Impact Factor: 7.538
Volume 11 Issue V May 2023- Available at www.ijraset.com

Malaria Detection in Blood Smeared Images Using

Convolutional Neural Networks
Harsh Raj1, Dr. S. Thanga Revathi2, Shikhar Srivastava3
Department of Networking and Communication, SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Chennai, India

Abstract: With 200 million cases annually, malaria often claims more lives than crisis and deadly wars. Given the ineffectiveness
of efforts to lower mortality rates, insufficient malaria diagnosis is one of the hurdles to a successful and efficient reduction in
fatality. Hence, malaria is one of the major causes of deaths and diseases in many developing countries, where young children and
prenatal mothers are the most impacted populations. The parasite called Plasmodium is the source for the potentially fatal disease
named malaria. Highly trained and experienced microscopists observe minute blood smeared images to look for the parasite.
Modern deep learning techniques could automate the completion of the required analysis. With the development of an
independent, accurate, and useful model the demand for skilled staff can be significantly decreased. In this study, we offer a totally
automated method and approach for the diagnosis and classification of malaria using microscopic blood-smeared pictures based
on convolutional neural networks-(CNN).
Keywords: Malaria, Diagnosis, Plasmodium, Microscopists, convolutional neural networks, Deep Learning.
I. INTRODUCTION
Humans are bitten by female Anopheles mosquitoes containing Plasmodium parasites from protozoa, which attack and expand red
blood cells, resulting in malaria. According to the WHO, more than 3.3 billion people around the world are at a huge risk of
contracting malaria each year. According to a World Health Organisation survey, 91 nations recorded more than 217 million cases for
the disease. The African region has the highest concentration of malaria cases worldwide, next trailed by South-eastern Asia and then
the East Mediterranean region. Frequent malarial symptoms include high fever, exhaustion, headaches, body aches, and, in very
severe cases, seizures along with coma, which all can be lethal if untreated quickly. Malaria is a deadly illness that can effectively be
avoided and treated to control it. It is a disease that advances quickly once it has been contracted. In many emerging and
developing-country populations, malaria is the leading cause of mortality, placing a major burden on our healthcare system. It is
endemic in many of the different regions in the world, which implies that people there frequently contract the disease. Therefore, in
order to save lives, early malaria diagnosis and treatment are crucial. We are inspired to improve malaria diagnostics' efficacy and
timeliness in the future as a result.
II. BACKROUND STUDY
1) Robert L. Clark,(2021) In the first trimester of pregnancy, there have recently been recommendations for the usage of artemisinin
based combination treatments (ACTs) for simple malaria. The WHO Guidelines for Malaria from 2021, however, reiterated their
stance that sufficient clinical safety information is not available on artemisinins to warrant such use. The WHO's stance is in line
with a number of problems with the clinical data that is currently available. First off, a meta-analysis that pooled the safety
information for several ACTs throughout the first trimester could not establish that all of the included ACTs were equally safe.
Second, because all first trimester periods' safety data were merged for the meta-analysis, not all subperiods—particularly
gestational Weeks 6–8, which is likely the most vulnerable period—show the same level of safety. Third, even if an individual
ACT is proven to have no impact on miscarriage rates, that does not imply that all ACTs are without developmental
consequences.
2) Amin Alqudah, Shoroq Qazan, Ali Mohammad Alqudah,(2020) Plasmodium, a single-celled parasite, is the source of the
infectious disease malaria. Typically, a female anopheles mosquito afflicted with this disease is used to spread malaria. Recent
statistics show that only 229 million instances of malaria were reported worldwide in 2018 and that the illness was responsible for
435,000 fatalities. The vulnerable portion of the global population is still over 40%. Nevertheless, a number of image analysis and
machine learning methods have been developed by scientists to take advantage of blood smear images and early malaria
detection. In this study, segmented contaminated and healthy red blood cells were classified using a newly created CNN algorithm
that takes advantage of transfer learning. The experimental outcomes demonstrate that, amongst all previously employed CNN
models, the suggested architecture effectively detects malaria having a high precision of 98.85%, a sensitivity of roughly 98.79%,
and a precision of approximately 98.90% while functioning at the quickest speed and lowest input size.

©IJRASET: All Rights are Reserved | SJ Impact Factor 7.538 | ISRA Journal Impact Factor 7.894 | 3162
 International Journal for Research in Applied Science & Engineering Technology (IJRASET)
ISSN: 2321-9653; IC Value: 45.98; SJ Impact Factor: 7.538
Volume 11 Issue V May 2023- Available at www.ijraset.com

3) Ali Mohammad Alqudah,(2020) OCT (optical coherence tomography) technology was initially employed for two-dimensional
eye imaging, yet it has since grown into among the most important and well-liked methods of imaging to perform noninvasive
examination of retinal retinal diseases. Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and diabetes macular swelling are both of the
most prevalent reasons for blindness discovered by OCT. It is becoming more difficult to classify eye retina illnesses using OCT
pictures due to recent advancements in machine learning as well as deep learning techniques. This research proposes a novel
automated convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for a multiclass classification system that uses spectral domain OCT
(SD-OCT). The methodology used to categorise common occurrences as well as five major forms of retinal illnesses, including
age-related macular degeneration (AMD), drusen, choroidal neovascularization, and diabetic macular edoema. The suggested
CNN architecture with a softmax classifier correctly recognised AMD in completely of cases and CNV in 98.86% of cases giving
a total precision of 95.30%. 99.17% of DME cases, 98.97% of drusen cases, and 99.15% of typical cases. Using SD-OCT scans,
this idea may prove to have a useful tool for the early diagnosis of retinal issues.
4) Aimon Rahman, Hasib Zunair, M Sohel Rahman,(2019) Most of humanity is afflicted with malaria, an illness that can be fatal
that is spread by female anopheles mosquito bites. In this research, patches segmented from microscopic pictures of red blood cell
smears are used to improve malaria diagnosis using deep convolutional neural networks. Unlike many previous methods that
require time-consuming manually extraction of features, the recommended method performs feature extraction as well as
classification straight from the raw, fragmented patches found in red blood smears. The research's dataset was the Malaria
Database from the National Institutes of Health. To compare and choose the best-performing design, accuracy and loss evaluation
criteria were used together with 5-fold cross validation. Several other intricate structures have been tested and put into practise to
see which one performs the best. To determine how effectively the suggested model generalises to fresh data, a test was also
carried out. The accuracy of our best model is about 97.77%.
5) Jane Hung, Anne Carpenter, (2017) Despite the enormous success of deep learning-based object detection models, biological
picture data has not yet seen widespread use of the most advanced techniques. For the initial time, we apply an object detection
model for identifying cells and their stages in brightfield microscopy pictures of blood that has been contaminated with malaria.
This model has already been applied to recognise objects in natural images. There are still many microorganisms being examined
utilising skilled inspectors and hand counting, especially parasites that cause malaria. This kind of identifying objects task is
challenging because of the variations in cell structure, the density, and colour in addition to the unreliability of some cell classes.
Furthermore, because healthy red blood cells predominate, the order of distribution of classes is very unbalanced, making it
challenging to locate data with annotations that is useful for training. Our study made use of (Faster R-CNN), among the most
effective models for object recognition in recent years. It was refined using training data from ImageNet before being enhanced
with our data.

III. METHODOLOGY
Malaria cell images are collected from Kaggle. Kaggle obtained the dataset for the project from the official NIH website:
https://ceb.nlm.nih.gov/repositories/malaria-datasets/.
The methods and steps for the project are as follows:

1) Data Collection and Pre-processing

Assemble a database of images depicting malaria. Then Prior to the image pre-procession, split the dataset into training sets and
validation sets, normalise the pixel values, and re-size the pictures to a fixed size (for example, 224x224).

2) Model Selection and Training

Choose CNN architectures such as VGG16 model, Resnet-50, and Inception for malaria classification. Initialize the pre-trained model
with ImageNet weights. Train the models using the training set of malaria images for a fixed number of epochs with a chosen batch
size.

3) Model Evaluation
Compute the training loss and the validation loss curves and also the accuracy curves for each model. Compare all the three models
with the help of metrics like F1-score, recall, accuracy, and precision.

©IJRASET: All Rights are Reserved | SJ Impact Factor 7.538 | ISRA Journal Impact Factor 7.894 | 3163
 International Journal for Research in Applied Science & Engineering Technology (IJRASET)
ISSN: 2321-9653; IC Value: 45.98; SJ Impact Factor: 7.538
Volume 11 Issue V May 2023- Available at www.ijraset.com

4) Modified VGG Hybrid Model

Create a modified VGG hybrid version by combining the features of VGG16 with other CNN architectures. Train the hybrid model
using the same dataset and hyperparameters as the other models.

5) Model Comparison
Contrast the performance of the customized and modified VGG hybrid model with the other models. Determine which model has the
highest accuracy and choose it as the final model.

6) Refer the below Diagrams

Dataset Images
(Infected &
Uninfected)
Baseline Proposed
model model

Training Process using Training Process using

VGG16, Inception V3 Modified VGG16
and ResNet50

Trained Network Trained

Model Network Model

Fig : Training process

Input Image

Preprocessing (Resizing)

Trained
Trained
Three Modified Modified
Three
Baseline VGG16 VGG16
Baseline
Classifier Network
Network
Model
Classified Classified
Result Result
(Infected or (Infected or
Uninfected Uninfected
) )

Compare the
performance
measure
Fig : Testing process

©IJRASET: All Rights are Reserved | SJ Impact Factor 7.538 | ISRA Journal Impact Factor 7.894 | 3164
 International Journal for Research in Applied Science & Engineering Technology (IJRASET)
ISSN: 2321-9653; IC Value: 45.98; SJ Impact Factor: 7.538
Volume 11 Issue V May 2023- Available at www.ijraset.com

IV. WORKING
The VGG16 hybrid deep learning model is a model that combines a custom CNN architecture with a pre-trained VGG16 network. The
model is designed for binary classification tasks, and is trained using image data.
The first part of the code sets up the data generators for training and testing. The ImageDataGenerator class is used to perform data
augmentation, which helps prevent overfitting and improves generalization performance. Using the flow_from_directory method, the
train and test data are loaded from a directory.
The main architecture of the model is defined using the Keras functional API. The input layer is defined to accept 224x224 RGB
images. Convolutional layers with progressively more filters and max pooling layers in between are then added in a series. The use of
batch normalization accelerates convergence and lessens overfitting. The output from each new convolutional layer is then combined
with the output from the first three layers in a separate pool. The feature vector is created by concatenating the generated feature maps
and then flattening them. Following a fully connected layer, this vector is passed through, and the output layer employs softmax
activation to produce a probability distribution over the two classes. For the input photos, the pre-trained VGG16 network serves as a
feature extractor. Concatenating the output of the VGG16 network with the output of the unique CNN architecture, and this
concatenated output is passed through the fully-connected layer to perform classification.
The binary cross-entropy loss function and stochastic gradient descent optimizer are used to build the model. The ModelCheckpoint
callback is used to track the model's training and testing accuracy throughout the course of 100 epochs of training. The model that is
created can be kept and applied to new data to make predictions. Overall, this architecture is made for binary image classification
problems and combines a bespoke CNN with a pre-trained VGG16 network. It is trained using stochastic gradient descent and
enhances performance via batch normalization and data augmentation.

V. RESULT AND ANALYSIS

To compare with different models, we used a hybrid model that incorporates a convolutional neural network (CNN) and the VGG16
architecture.. The model first extracts feature from the photos using VGG16, and then classifies the images using CNN. Convolutional
and max-pooling layers are then joined by fully connected layers in the CNN design. To avoid overfitting, the model additionally
employs batch normalisation and dropout. The photos are divided into two categories by the last dense layer using the softmax
activation function. To reduce the loss function, the model employs the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimizer. Using a binary
loss of cross-entropy function, the algorithm is trained. On execution, we easily find that this model is more stable and has less
validation and training loss when compared to other models. It is accurate and does not fluctuate in accuracy readings over epochs.
This can be understood better with the following graphs for the comparison.
As we can see from the graphs below, there are initially fluctuations in the accuracy curve but a smooth curve is acquired as the model
is trained through epochs. Finally, the graph becomes stable as training accuracy tends to 100 percent whereas testing accuracy
touches 97.7 percent.
In Inception, the model does not show the progress as expected. Thea accuracy hovers around the 50 percent mark and there is a lot of
instability and disturbance.
In resnet the model touches 90% mark in accuracy but it goes under many fluctuations and is unstable. Hence, we can conclude that
Hybrid VGG16 Model is the most efficient and productive when compared to other models
Also, the saved model can be loaded to pass an input image through the model, and predict whether the image contains malaria or not.
For example, taking random images from the above given dataset and feeding it to the model gives us the much-required classification
of malaria. Some outputs obtained were:
Image cells for malaria classification -

Malaria containing cell image

©IJRASET: All Rights are Reserved | SJ Impact Factor 7.538 | ISRA Journal Impact Factor 7.894 | 3165
 International Journal for Research in Applied Science & Engineering Technology (IJRASET)
ISSN: 2321-9653; IC Value: 45.98; SJ Impact Factor: 7.538
Volume 11 Issue V May 2023- Available at www.ijraset.com

Malaria absent cell image

VGG16 Model

Inception model

Resnet model

Hybrid VGG16 Model

VI. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE SCOPE

The modified VGG16 model, which combines the layers of VGG16 and Inception, achieved the greatest performance among all the
models assessed, it can be inferred from the analysis and findings. With reduced fluctuation and a more consistent accuracy curve
during training, the model was able to reach high accuracy. The testing accuracy was 97% and the validation accuracy was 100%,
which was superior to all other models considered. The performance of the models can be further improved by exploring more
sophisticated techniques like transfer learning or fine-tuning of pre-trained models. To get even better outcomes, it may also be
investigated to incorporate other sophisticated approaches as data augmentation, ensemble learning, and hyperparameter tweaking.
Furthermore, the model can be deployed on various platforms for real-time diagnosis of malaria.

©IJRASET: All Rights are Reserved | SJ Impact Factor 7.538 | ISRA Journal Impact Factor 7.894 | 3166
 International Journal for Research in Applied Science & Engineering Technology (IJRASET)
ISSN: 2321-9653; IC Value: 45.98; SJ Impact Factor: 7.538
Volume 11 Issue V May 2023- Available at www.ijraset.com

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