Automatic System for Classification of Erythrocytes Infected with Malaria and Identification of Parasite's Life Stage

Malaria is a serious disease caused by a blood parasite named Plasmodium spp. The World Health Organization estimates 300-500 million malaria cases and more than 1 million deaths per year (Tek F. B. et al., 2006). Manual counting and classifications of infected erythrocytes is a time-consuming and laborious process (Selena W.S. Sio et al., 2007).The aim of our study to develop a fully automatic system for counting and classification of Malaria parasite infected erythrocytes and detection of life stage of parasites. The system uses Giemsa stained thin blood images for processing; using Otsu's threshold erythrocytes are segmented form pre-processed images; watershed algorithm is used to separate overlapped cells. Statistical and colour features are extracted and given to the SVM binary classifier which classifies Malaria infected erythrocytes and SVM multi classifier is used for detection of parasite life stages.