The computer-aided diagnosis of malaria parasites by blood testing images

Abstract

Malaria caused by Plasmodium parasites is a lifethreatening disease in humans, transmitted through
the bite of an infected Anopheles mosquito. The most
common technique for detecting malaria parasites is
Giemsa stained blood smear on optical microscopes.
However, conventional microscopy has proved inefficient,
because this technique is often time-consuming while the
results of the analysis are dependent on the technical’s
level and difficult to reproduce. Many studies have
been proposed to replace diagnostic techniques based
on the support of computer vision. In this review, the
authors briefly presented the typical results of recent
developments in the computer field to support the
diagnosis of malaria parasites. The process of diagnosis
and identification of malaria parasites, which included
image standardisation, segmentation of blood cells and
parasites, feature extraction and classification of specific
features, was also introduced in this paper. Finally,
the authors discussed existing challenges together
with proposing research directions to apply automatic
diagnostic methods of malaria parasites in Vietnam.