Biomedical Letters

Detection of Malarial Parasite from Blood Smear Image

Manasvi, Sai Aarthi Ganesh*, Sridhar Anjali, Kunnavakkam Vinjimoor Swetha, Krishnamoorthi Nirmala

Department of Biomedical Engineering, SSN College of Engineering, Kalavakkam, Chennai, India

Abstract

Members of the genus Plasmodium cause a febrile disease called malaria. The conventional method to diagnose malaria using microscopy consumes more time and difficult to reproduce the results. Diagnosis of malaria using microscope involves expert technician to examine the slide with intense visual and mental concentration and there is a high possibility of erroneous diagnosis even by experienced technicians. To overcome the limitations of the conventional method of manual counting, an automation of the evaluation process is presented in this paper. An automated system is presented to identify the presence of the malarial parasite in blood smear images using image processing techniques. The entire process of diagnosis can be done faster using image-based screening and is more advantageous than laboratory procedures. Pre-processing and segmentation techniques followed by detection of infected cells were employed to identify the presence of malarial parasites from stained blood smear images. A Graphical User Interface was created to provide a positive and negative diagnosis of malaria.