Malaria Parasite Detection with Deep Transfer Learning

This study aims to aromatically detect malaria parasites (Plasmodium sp) on images taken from Giemsa stained blood smears. Deep learning methods provide limited performance when sample size is low. In transfer learning, visual features are learned from large general data sets, and problem-specific classification problem can be solved successfully in restricted problem specific data sets. In this study, we apply transfer learning method to detect and classify malaria parasites. We use a popular pre-trained CNN model VGG19. We trained the model for 20 epoch on 1428 P. Vivax, 1425 P. Ovale, 1446 P. Falciparum, 1450 P. Malariae and 1440 non-parasite samples. The transfer learning model achieves %80, %83, %86, %75 precision and 83%, 86%, 86%, 79% f-measure on 19 test images.