A novel stacked CNN for malarial parasite detection in thin blood smear images

Malaria refers to a contagious mosquito-borne disease caused by parasite genus plasmodium transmitted by mosquito female Anopheles. As infected mosquito bites a person, the parasite multiplies in the host's liver and start destroying the red-cells. The disease is examined visually under the microscope for infected red-cells. This diagnosis depends upon the expertise and experience of pathologists and reports may vary in different laboratories doing a manual examination. Another way around, many machine learning techniques have been applied for spontaneous detection of blood smears. However, feature engineering is a challenging task that requires expertise to adjust positional and morphological features. Therefore, this study proposes a novel Stacked Convolutional Neural Network architecture that improves the automatic detection of malaria without considering the hand-crafted features. The 5-fold cross-validation process on 27, 558 cell images with equal instances of parasitized and uninfected cells on a publicly available dataset from the National Institute of health, the accuracy of our proposed model is 99.98%. Furthermore, the statistical results revealed that the proposed model is superior to the state-of-the-art models with 100% precision, 99.9% recall, and 99% f1-measure.