CLASSIFICATION AND ANALYSIS OF MALARIA PARASITE SPECIES

Objectives:
1. To recognize the malaria parasite from the peripheral blood smear image and to classify it
into four different species.
2. To detect and analyze the stages of Plasmodium species as ring, trophozite, schizont and
gametocyte.

Methodology:
The task is to distinguish whether or not a red blood cell is infected by malaria and,
therefore, the selected features must provide information with which it is possible to carry out
such classification. The species differ in the shape of the infected (occupied) cell, presence of
some characteristic dots(Schüffner's dots, Maurer's clefts, Ziemann's Stippling) and the
morphology of the parasite in some of the life-cycle-stages. The life-cycle-stage of the parasite is
defined by its morphology, size (i.e. maturity), and the presence or absence of malarial pigment
(i.e. Haemozoin).

The classificaion is done based on feature extraction, the aim of feature extraction is to
transform the input data into a reduced set of features that extract the relevant information from
the input data. It is desirable to focus on these features, because it is already known that they are
able to differentiate between infected and non infected red blood cells and between species of
malaria. Such features, which may include, for example, the relative size of the infected red
blood cells; the relative eccentricity of the infected cells; smoothness of the cell margin; the
relative color of infected red blood cells; and texture information of infected cells, i.e. presence
of stippling. Another set of features can be based on image characteristics that include various
features that are for the purpose of this work grouped into shape features, intensity features, and
texture features
The following steps is used to classify the Plasmodium species:

Shape of the Parasite

The infected Blood
smear image.
(Enhanced and Size of the Infected RBC
Segmented)

Number of chromatin count

Feature Extraction
Number of parasite per RBC

Texture of RBC

Location of chromatin within

parasite.

.
Based on the above features, color of the RBC and the number of chromatin dots present
in the RBC segmented image, we classify the blood stages of the species whether it is in Ring,
Trophozoite , Schizont , Gametocyte. For all the four species it is possible to differentiate the
stages based on the above mentioned characteristics.
The classification of the Malaria Parasite can be shown as follows.

Malaria Parasite
MalarParasite

P.Falciparum P.Vivax P.Ovale P.Malariae

Ring Ring Ring Ring
Trophozoite Trophozoite Trophozoite Trophozoite
Schizont Schizont Schizont Schizont
Gametocyte Gametocyte Gametocyte Gametocyte

Implementation Tools: C, C++, Open CV, .NET technology.

References:

• Research article on: Segmentation of malaria parasites in peripheral blood

smear images by Vishnu V. Makkapati and Raghuveer M. Rao
• Research article on: Classification of Malaria Parasite Species by Noorhidayati Abu
Seman.
• Citing internet sources URL:http://www.netdoctor.co.uk/travel/diseases/malaria_
disease.htm
• Research article on: Diagnosis of malaria infection by F. Castelli, G.Carosi ,Institute of
Infectious and Tropical Diseases (Director: Prof. G. Carosi)University of Brescia (Italy)