Multithresholding Approach for Segmenting Plasmodium Parasites

Abstract

Malaria has become one of the deadliest diseases in the world. The main method in diagnosing malaria is manually conducted by pathologists using a microscope. This process is time-consuming and prone to error due to human factor. These facts encourage the development of system that consistently yielded more objective results regardless of the condition on the field. In this research work, a novel method to segment infected erythrocytes using threshold and morphological is proposed. The proposed method was tested in a database consisting of 30 images with varying condition. The experimental results showed that the proposed method achieved 96.74 ± 0.7075 %, 76.77 ± 2.1441 %, 99.74 ± 0.1397 %, 97.84 ± 1.2514 % and 96.61 ± 0.8021 % of accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, prediction value positive and prediction value negative, respectively. In conclusion, the proposed method provides a consistent result for segmenting parasite in infected erythrocytes image. This result indicates that this proposed scheme is proper to assist the pathologists in detecting Plasmodium parasites.