Deep unsupervised learning for Microscopy-Based Malaria detection

Abstract

Malaria, a mosquito-borne disease caused by a parasite, kills over 1 million people globally each year. People, if left untreated, may develop severe complications, leading to death. Effective and accurate diagnosis is important for the management and control of malaria. Our research focuses on utilizing machine learning to improve the efficiency in Malaria diagnosis. We utilize a modified U-net architecture, as an unsupervised learning model, to conduct cell boundary detection. The blood cells infected by malaria are then identified in chromatic space by a Mahalanobis distance algorithm. Both the cell segmentation and Malaria detection process often requires intensive manual label, which we hope to eliminate via the unsupervised workflow.