Intelligent System for Parasitized Malaria Infection Detection Using Local Descriptors

Malaria is a curative disease, with therapeutics available for patients, such as drugs that can prevent future malaria infections in countries vulnerable to malaria. Though, there is no effective malaria vaccine until now, although it is an interesting research area in medicine. Local descriptors of blood smear image are exploited in this paper to solve parasitized malaria infection detection problem. Swarm intelligence is used to separate the red blood cells from the background of the blood slide image in adaptive manner. After that, the effective corner points are detected and localized using Harris corner detection method. Two types of local descriptors are generated from the local regions of the effective corners which are Gabor based features and color based features. The extracted features are finally fed to Deep Belief Network (DBN) for classification purpose. Different tests were performed and different combinations of feature types are attempted. The achieved results showed that when using combined vectors of local descriptors, the system gives the desired accuracy which is 100%. The achieved result demonstrates the effectiveness of using local descriptors in solving malaria infection detection problem.