A novel method based on convolutional neural network for malaria diagnosis

Malaria is one of the three major diseases with the highest mortality worldwide and can turn fatal if not taken seriously. The key to surviving this disease is its early diagnosis. However, manual diagnosis is time consuming and tedious due to the large amount of image data. Generally, computer-aided diagnosis can effectively improve doctors' perception and accuracy. This paper presents a medical diagnosis method powered by convolutional neural network (CNN) to extract features from images and improve early detection of malaria. The image sharpening and histogram equalization method are used aiming at enlarging the difference between parasitized regions and other area. Dropout technology is employed in every convolutional layer to reduce overfitting in the network, which is proved to be effective. The proposed CNN model achieves a significant performance with the best classification accuracy of 99.98%. Moreover, this paper compares the proposed model with the pretrained CNNs and other traditional algorithms. The results indicate the proposed model can achieve state-of-the-art performance from multiple metrics. In general, the novelty of this work is the reduction of the CNN structure to only five layers, thereby greatly reducing the running time and the number of parameters, which is demonstrated in the experiments. Furthermore, the proposed model can assist clinicians to accurately diagnose the malaria disease.