1. Convolutional neural networks to automate the screening of malaria in low-resource countries
- Author
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Deepti Valliappan, Adriane Morales, Anagata Anand, Juhi P. Patel, Aditya Ojha, Sandhya Tiku, Nicholas Chu, Dat Nguyen, Ryan Chen, Ravali Bhavaraju, Kevin Nguyen, Oliver S. Zhao, and Nikhil L. Kolluri
- Subjects
business.product_category ,Bioinformatics ,Epidemiology ,Computer science ,Data Mining and Machine Learning ,030231 tropical medicine ,Global health ,lcsh:Medicine ,Bioengineering ,Convolutional neural network ,General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology ,Giemsa stain ,Data science ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,parasitic diseases ,Machine learning ,medicine ,Internet access ,030304 developmental biology ,0303 health sciences ,Infectious disease ,Public health ,business.industry ,General Neuroscience ,Deep learning ,lcsh:R ,Computational Biology ,General Medicine ,medicine.disease ,Malaria ,Red blood cell ,Infectious Diseases ,Infectious disease (medical specialty) ,Mobile phone ,Medical emergency ,Artificial intelligence ,General Agricultural and Biological Sciences ,business ,Neural networks - Abstract
Malaria is an infectious disease caused by Plasmodium parasites, transmitted through mosquito bites. Symptoms include fever, headache, and vomiting, and in severe cases, seizures and coma. The World Health Organization reports that there were 228 million cases and 405,000 deaths in 2018, with Africa representing 93% of total cases and 94% of total deaths. Rapid diagnosis and subsequent treatment are the most effective means to mitigate the progression into serious symptoms. However, many fatal cases have been attributed to poor access to healthcare resources for malaria screenings. In these low-resource settings, the use of light microscopy on a thin blood smear with Giemsa stain is used to examine the severity of infection, requiring tedious and manual counting by a trained technician. To address the malaria endemic in Africa and its coexisting socioeconomic constraints, we propose an automated, mobile phone-based screening process that takes advantage of already existing resources. Through the use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), we utilize a SSD multibox object detection architecture that rapidly processes thin blood smears acquired via light microscopy to isolate images of individual red blood cells with 90.4% average precision. Then we implement a FSRCNN model that upscales 32 × 32 low-resolution images to 128 × 128 high-resolution images with a PSNR of 30.2, compared to a baseline PSNR of 24.2 through traditional bicubic interpolation. Lastly, we utilize a modified VGG16 CNN that classifies red blood cells as either infected or uninfected with an accuracy of 96.5% in a balanced class dataset. These sequential models create a streamlined screening platform, giving the healthcare provider the number of malaria-infected red blood cells in a given sample. Our deep learning platform is efficient enough to operate exclusively on low-tier smartphone hardware, eliminating the need for high-speed internet connection.
- Published
- 2020