Imperial Journal of Interdisciplinary Research (IJIR)
Vol-3, Issue-2, 2017
ISSN: 2454-1362, http://www.onlinejournal.in
Malaria Parasite Detection Using Image Processing
Rohit. M. Kandari, Harshada. S. Bhere, Shraddha. B. Pophale,
Prof. Sonali. J. Mane
Bharati Vidyapeeth College of Engineering.
Sector-7, C.B.D, Belpada, Navi Mumbai-400614, India.
Abstract— Malaria is a serious disease. According
to the World Health Organization, it is responsible
for nearly one million deaths each year, for which the
immediate diagnosis is required in-order to control it.
There are various techniques to diagnose malaria of
which manual microscopy is the gold standard.
However due to the number of steps required in
manual assessment, this diagnostic method is time
consuming (leading to late diagnosis) and likely to
have human error leading to erroneous diagnosis,
even in experienced hands. If the false detection is
done, then the disease can turn into more severe
state. So, to overcome this flaw the study about the
computerized diagnosis is done in this paper, which
will help in immediate detection of the disease to
some extent, So that the proper treatment can be
given to the malaria patient. This is achieved by using
few methods for detecting malaria parasites like
Feature extraction. This proposed system help to
minimize time as well as provide the accuracy to
detect Malaria to some extent.
Keywords— Malaria diagnosis, Detection, Infected
RBC, Feature Extraction, Severity.
I. INTRODUCTION
Malaria is a disease, transmitted through the bite of a
female Anopheles mosquito it should be taken care at
the early stage .as inside the human body, the parasite
undergoes a complex life cycle in which it grows and
reproduces and diagnosis at the later stage can be life-
threatening. During this process, the red blood cells
(RBCs) are used as hosts and are destroyed
afterwards. Therefore, the ratio of parasite-infected
cells to the total number of red blood cells can be
used to find the severity of the disease and is an
important in selecting the appropriate treatment and
drug usage.
Malaria is a serious global disease, if it has been
not treated or detected from the starting stage it could
be more severe or sometime may cause to death. It
affects between 350 and 500 million people and
causes more than 1 million deaths every year. Malaria
is detected manually in which microscopes are used
to find the disease by pathologists which sometimes
can might lead to false detection or no detection.
Currently, clinical diagnosis primarily utilizes
microscopy to study the prepared blood smears.
However, detection of parasite are difficult and time
Imperial Journal of Interdisciplinary Research (IJIR)
consuming, especially in situations where large
numbers of samples require reliable analysis. Hence,
it is important to develop an automated image
analysis which can be used to identify the uninfected
and infected RBCs in a blood smear image.
In this paper, Image Processing is done to detect the
presence of Malaria Parasite in the RBCs. Malaria
Parasite is detected by using Feature Extraction. In
this proposed system, fully automated image
classification is used to positively identify malaria
parasite present in the thin blood smears.
II. EXISTING METHOD
A. Clinical diagnosis: Clinical diagnosis is the
least expensive, most commonly used method and is
the basis for self-treatment. However, the overlapping
of malaria symptoms with other tropical diseases
damages its specificity(uniqueness) and therefore
encourages the careless judgement use of anti-
malarial for managing febrile (symptoms of fever)
conditions. This practice was understandable in the
past when inexpensive and well-tolerated anti-
malarial were still effective. Accuracy of a clinical
diagnosis varies with the level of certain area, malaria
season, and age group. No single clinical algorithm is
a universal predictor.
B. Biologic diagnosis: In 1904, Gustav Giemsa
introduced a mixture of methylene blue and eosin
stains. Microscopic examination of Giemsa-stained
blood smears has subsequently become the Important
standard of malaria diagnosis. In the past 50 years,
alternative methods became available. Molecular
methods, like DNA probes and polymerase chain
reaction (PCR) were introduced between 1980s–
1990s. Methods for detecting malaria parasites by
fluorescent staining also emerged Detection of
malaria pigments by depolarized laser light and mass
spectrometry showed limited success.
III. Methodology
Input – The input to our system will be the
microscopic image of the human RBC which is be
generated in the laboratory. The image is captured by
attaching a microscope with the computer. Input
consist of two types of images:
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Imperial Journal of Interdisciplinary Research (IJIR)
Vol-3, Issue-2, 2017
ISSN: 2454-1362, http://www.onlinejournal.in
1. Malaria Infected RBC image
2. Non-Infected (Healthy person) RBC image
Feature Extraction – Feature extraction a type of
dimensionality reduction that efficiently represents
interesting parts of an image. Feature Extraction
consist of various methods this system uses two
methods:
 Color Extraction – All parasite consists of
different frequencies. This frequency help to define
the malaria parasite. As the parasite differ, the
frequencies of their color also differ from each other
which could be used for detecting the malaria
parasite. The detection of malaria parasite can be
easily done by using the Giemsa stain which helps to
give a distinctive appearance. Then the microscopic
image of this giemsa strain is given as an input to the
system and base on color(stain) the detection of
malaria is carried out. Later the noise is removed
from the image for further process and based on the
intensity of the color of the malaria parasite either the
person is infected or not can be determined.
Edge Detection - As discussed earlier, all the object
obtained from the Feature Extraction are further
processed for detecting the edge, an edge is either the
boundary between an object and the background or
between more than one overlapping objects. There
are several types of edge detectors like Sobel
Operator, Robert’s Operator, Log Operator, Canny
Operator, Prewitt Operator and Zerocross Operator.
 Sobel Operator - It executes a 2-D spatial
directional change in the intensity or color in an
image measurement on an image and focuses on
regions of high spatial frequency that are related to
the edges, it is used to find the approximate absolute
gradient magnitude at each point of an 2D scale
image (input gray scale image or the binary image)
Corner Detection – This is an approach used
within computer vision systems to extract certain
kinds of features and conclude the contents of an
image.
 Harris corner – After detecting the
boundary of the object it is further analyzed for
finding the corners of the object. The object contains
information about the feature points detected in a 2-D
input image.
Severity – This step is carried out to determine the
severity of the patient disease. As the ring trophozoite
splits itself to form schizont stage, size of the later
one is much bigger than the ring trophozoite. Also,
Imperial Journal of Interdisciplinary Research (IJIR)
the schizont form of the parasite is denser and
clumsier than ring trophozoite. For this reason, the
number of detected Harris corner points per area is
formulated as the metric to determine the stage of the
malarial parasite within RBC. The severity of the
disease is calculated as: [8]
Severity =
Result – The system will generate the output either
the person is infected by malaria or not. If the person
is infected, it would display it with the severity of the
disease which can further be helpful for the doctors to
provide with the same level of medication as per the
severity of the person.
Algorithm:
The Algorithm to detect Malaria is described below:
Step 1. Stained blood smear of patient is prepared and
fed to program as input.
Step 2. Convert the RGB image into the gray scale
image.
Step 3. Extract out the infected image.
Step 4. Remove noise using bwareaopen.
Step 5. Area of each of the components is calculated
using regionprops on the connected objects.
Step 6. Malaria infected or Healthy result is obtained
based on this further process are carried out.
Step 7. Sobel edge detection algorithm is applied on
the obtained image to detect malarial parasite.
Step 8. Harris Corner Detection Algorithm is applied.
Step 9. All the Harris corner detected pixel positions
are computed. From these values, a metic is
formulated which can detect stage of malaria.
V. CONCLUSION
The detection of Malaria parasites is done by
pathologists by manually using Microscopes. So, the
possibility of false detection due to human error is
high and which in turn can result into fatal condition.
This system will help to minimizes the human error
while detecting the presence of malaria parasites in
the blood sample by using image processing and
minimize human error by automation. In this
proposed system, Feature Extraction is used to detect
malaria parasites in images acquired from blood
samples. The system is unaffected by the exceptional
conditions and can be helped to achieved high
percentages of sensitivity, specificity, positive
prediction value.
And by this one can find the severity of the disease
and can be treated from the early stage.
Page 468
Imperial Journal of Interdisciplinary Research (IJIR)
Vol-3, Issue-2, 2017
ISSN: 2454-1362, http://www.onlinejournal.in

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