Malaria Parasite Detection in Thick Blood Smear Microscopic Images Using Modified YOLOV3 and YOLOV4 Models

Abstract Background Information: Manual microscopic examination is still the ”golden standard” for malaria diagnosis. The challenge in the manual microscopy is the fact that its accuracy, consistency and speed of diagnosis depends on the skill of the laboratory technician. It is difficult to get highly skilled laboratory technicians in the remote areas of developing countries. In order to alleviate this problem, in this paper, we propose and investigate the state-of-the-art one-stage and two-stage object detection algorithms for automated malaria parasite screening from thick blood slides. Methods: YOLOV3 and YOLOV4 are state-of-the-art object detectors both in terms of accuracy and speed; however, they are not optimized for the detection of small objects such as malaria parasite in microscopic images. To deal with these challenges, we have modified YOLOV3 and YOLOV4 models by increasing the feature scale and by adding more detection layers, without notably decreasing their detection speed. We have proposed one modified YOLOV4 model, called YOLOV4-MOD and two modified models for YOLOV3, which are called YOLOV3-MOD1 and YOLOV3-MOD2. In addition, we have generated new anchor box scales and sizes by using the K-means clustering algorithm to exploit small object detection learning ability of the models. Results: The proposed modified YOLOV3 and YOLOV4 algorithms are evaluated on publicly available malaria dataset and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy by exceeding the performance of their original versions, Faster R-CNN and SSD in terms of mean average precision (mAP), recall, precision, F1 score, and average IOU. For 608 x 608 input resolution YOLOV4-MOD achieves the best detection performance among all the other models with mAP of 96.32%. For the same input resolution YOLOV3-MOD2 and YOLOV3-MOD1 achieved mAP of 96.14% and 95.46% respectively. Conclusions: Th experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed modified YOLOV3 and YOLOV4 models are reliable to be applied for detection of malaria parasite from images that can be captured by smartphone camera over the microscope eyepiece. The proposed system can be easily deployed in low-resource setting and it can save lives.