Malaria Screener: a smartphone application for automated malaria screening

BMC Infectious Diseases

Kannappan Palaniappan¹  Ilker Ersoy²  Hang Yu³  Mahdieh Poostchi³  Feng Yang³  Stefan Jaeger³  Sivaramakrishnan Rajaraman³  Sameer Antani³  Golnaz Moallem⁴  Richard J. Maude⁵ 

[1] Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, University of Missouri-Columbia, 65211, Columbia, MO, USA;Institute for Data Science and Informatics, University of Missouri-Columbia, 65211, Columbia, MO, USA;Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, 20894, Bethesda, MD, USA;Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, 20894, Bethesda, MD, USA;Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, Texas Tech University, 79409, Lubbock, TX, USA;Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit, Mahidol University, 10400, Bangkok, Thailand;Centre for Tropical Medicine and Global Health, Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK;Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, USA;

关键词: Automated light microscopy;    Smartphone application;    Malaria;    Machine learning;    Convolutional neural network;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12879-020-05453-1

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundLight microscopy is often used for malaria diagnosis in the field. However, it is time-consuming and quality of the results depends heavily on the skill of microscopists. Automating malaria light microscopy is a promising solution, but it still remains a challenge and an active area of research. Current tools are often expensive and involve sophisticated hardware components, which makes it hard to deploy them in resource-limited areas.ResultsWe designed an Android mobile application called Malaria Screener, which makes smartphones an affordable yet effective solution for automated malaria light microscopy. The mobile app utilizes high-resolution cameras and computing power of modern smartphones to screen both thin and thick blood smear images for P. falciparum parasites. Malaria Screener combines image acquisition, smear image analysis, and result visualization in its slide screening process, and is equipped with a database to provide easy access to the acquired data.ConclusionMalaria Screener makes the screening process faster, more consistent, and less dependent on human expertise. The app is modular, allowing other research groups to integrate their methods and models for image processing and machine learning, while acquiring and analyzing their data.

【 授权许可】

CC BY