Abstract
In this study, an automatic malaria parasite detector is proposed to perceive the malaria-infected erythrocytes in a blood smear image and to separate parasites from the infected erythrocytes. The detector hence can verify whether a patient is infected with malaria. It could more objectively and efficiently help a doctor in diagnosing malaria. The experimental results show that the proposed method can provide impressive performance in segmenting the malaria-infected erythrocytes and the parasites from a blood smear image taken under a microscope. This paper also presents a weighted Sobel operation to compute the image gradient. The experimental results demonstrates that the weighted Sobel operation can provide more clear-cut and thinner object contours in object segmentation.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Canny, J., A computational approach to edge detection. IEEE Trans Pattern Anal Mach Intell PAMI-8(6):679–698, 1986.
Carlone, P., Palazzo, G. S., and Pasquino, R., Pultrusion manufacturing process development: Cure optimization by hybrid computational methods. Comput. Math. Appl. 53:1464–1471, 2007.
Chan, Y. K., Tsai, M. H., Huang, D. C., and Zheng, Z. H., Leukocyte nucleus segmentation and nucleus lobe counting. BMC Bioinf 11(558):1–18, 2010.
Chiodini, P. L., Moody, A. H., and Manser, D. W., Atlas of medical helminthology and protozoology, 4th edition. Churchill Livingstone, Edinburgh, New York, 2001.
Cross, C., Malaria Control Measure. (http://malaria.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTD023987.html), November 2004.
Gelasca, E. D., Byun, J. B., Obara, and Manjunath, B. S., Evaluation and benchmark for biological image segmentation. 15th IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2008), San Diego, CA, USA, pp. 1816–1819, 2008.
Gonzalez, R. C., and Woods, R. E., Digital image processing, 3rd edition. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, N.J, 2008.
Haupt, R. L., and Haupt, S. E., Practical genetic algorithms, vol. 2. John Wiley, Hoboken, N.J., 2004.
Kumar, S., Ong, S. H., Ranganath, S., Ong, T. C., and Chew, F. T., A rule-based approach for robust clump splitting. Pattern Recogn. 39(6):1088–1098, 2006.
Le, M. T., Bretschneider, T. R., Kuss, C., and Preiser P. R., A novel semi-automatic image processing approach to determine plasmodium falciparum parasitemia in giemsa-stained thin blood smears. BMC Cell Biol. 9(15), 2008.
Moody, A. H., and Chiodini, P. L., Methods for the detection of blood parasites. Clin. Lab. Haematol. 22(4):189–201, 2000.
Nasir, A. S. A., Mashor, M. Y., and Mohamed, Z., Colour image segmentation approach for detection of malaria parasites using various colour models and k-means clustering. WSEAS Trans. Biol. Biomed. 1(10):41–55, 2013.
Nixon, M. S., and Aguado, A. S., Feature extraction and image processing, 1st edition. Newnes, Oxford, 2002.
Otsu, N., A threshold selection method from gray-level histograms. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. 9(1):62–66, 1979.
Payne, D., Use and limitations of light microscopy for diagnosing malaria at the primary health care level. Bull. World Health Organ. 66(5):621–626, 1988.
Perez-Jorge, E. V., and Herchline, T., Malaria: eMedicine Infectious Diseases. (http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/221134-overview).
Ross, N. E., Pritchard, C. J., Rubin, D. M., and Dusé, A. G., Automated image processing method for the diagnosis and classification of malaria on thin blood smears. Med. Biol. Eng. Comput. 44(5):427–436, 2006.
Ruberto, C. D., Dempster, A., Khan, S., and Jarra, B., Analysis of infected blood cell images using morphological operators. Image Vis. Comput. 20(2):133–146, 2002.
Sezgin, M., and Sankur, B., Survey over image thresholding techniques and quantitative performance evaluation. J. Electron. Imaging 13(1):146–165, 2004.
Shi, Y. Q., and Sun, H., Image and video compression for multimedia engineering fundamentals, algorithms, standards. 2nd ed. CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group, 2008.
Sio, S. W. S., Sun, W., Kumar, S., Bin, W. Z., Tan, S. S., Ong, S. H., Kikuchi, H., Oshima, Y., and Tan, K. S. W., MalariaCount: An image analysis-based program for the accurate determination of parasitemia. J. Microbiol. Methods 68(1):11–18, 2007.
Trampuz, A., Jereb, M., Muzlovic, I., and Prabhu, R. M., Clinical review: Severe malaria. Crit. Care 7:315–323, 2003.
Tsutsumi, Y., Case 206, Malaria Falciparum. (http://www.fujita-hu.ac.jp/~tsutsumi/case/case206.htm).
Vallejo, A. F., Chaparro, P. E., Benavides, Y., Álvarez, Á., Quintero, J. P., Padilla, J., Arévalo-Herrera, M., and Herrera, S., High prevalence of sub-microscopic infections in Colombia. Malar. J. 14(201), May 2015, doi:10.1186/s12936-015-0711-6.
World Health Organization, World Malaria Report 2014, Geneva: World Health Organization, 2014.
Zuiderveld, K., Contrast limited adaptive histogram equalization. In: Heckbert, P. (Ed.) Graphics gems IV, Academic Press, pp. 474–485, 1994.
Zhou, Z., Wu, S., Chang, K. J., Chen, W. R., Chen, Y. S., Kuo, W. H., Lin, C. C., and Tsui, P. H., Classification of benign and malignant breast tumors in ultrasound images with posterior acoustic shadowing using half-contour features. J. Med. Biol. Eng. 35:178–187, 2015.
Authors’ Contributions
MHT and YKC conceived the study. SSY designed the approach and performed the computational analysis with CCJ. MHT and YKC supervised the work and tested the program. MHT, SSY, YKC and CCJ wrote the manuscript. MHT prepared the samples and collected the data. MHT and YKC contributed analyzing experimental studies. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. YKC and SSY contributed equally and are the correspondents as well as listed in alphabetical order.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Additional information
This article is part of the Topical Collection on Transactional Processing Systems
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Tsai, MH., Yu, SS., Chan, YK. et al. Blood Smear Image Based Malaria Parasite and Infected-Erythrocyte Detection and Segmentation. J Med Syst 39, 118 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-015-0280-9
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-015-0280-9