International Journal of Computational Intelligence and Information Security, December 2011 Vol. 2, No.

12

Texture and Intensity Based Classification of Malaria Parasite in Blood Images Using Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm.
Neetu Ahirwar1 and Swapnajit Pattnaik2
M.Tech. (C.T.) NIT Raipur (C.G.) India 1 Asst.Prof. (Electrical Engg.) NIT Raipur (C.G.) India 2

nahirwar13@gmail.com, swapnajit.pattnaik@gmail.com

Abstract
Image classification plays an important part in the fields of Remote sensing, Image analysis and Pattern recognition. The global burden of malaria is enormous and the development of better laboratory diagnostic tools is a key step in malaria control recommended by the WHO. The objective of the paper is to develop a fully automated image classification system to positively identify malaria parasites present in stained blood films. The digital images of oil immersion views from microscopic slides captured though a capture card are used. They were pre-processed by segmentation and grayscale conversion to reduce their dimensionality and later fed into a feed forward back propagation neural network (NN) for training it. After feature extraction LevenbergMarquardt algorithm is used to classify malaria parasite. MATLAB 7.01, its image processing toolbox and ANN toolbox have been used to implement the algorithm. The training data set of an ANN contains the texture and intensity feature values which best describes the pattern. First order features (Mean, Standard Deviation, Skewness, Kurtosis, Energy and Entropy), based on the image histograms are used. Keywords: Malaria Parasite Classification, Medical Image Processing, Intensity Features, Texture Features, Erythrocytes.

1. Introduction
Malaria is one of the leading causes of death in the world. It is estimated that there are 300-500 million new cases every year, with 1.5 to 2.7 million deaths worldwide [1]. Research has shown that malaria is caused by four species of the genus malaria parasite Plasmodium (i.e. Plasmodium falciparum, Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium ovale and Plasmodium malariae) [2]. Plasmodium is actually a small, single-cell blood organism or protozoan which originated from a species of mosquito called Anopheles [1]. It is the Anopheles mosquito bites that can spread the Plasmodium into the human blood stream. A number of new methods have been developed in recent years for the diagnosis of malaria. These include the use of uorescent microscopy, rapid antigen detection methods and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) -based techniques that detect speci c nucleic acid sequences [4]. Despite these advances, malaria diagnosis by means of light microscopy remains the most widely and commonly used method [3]. Microscopic diagnosis entails examining thick and thin blood smears for the presence of Plasmodia. It is the most efficient and reliable diagnostic technique and is very sensitive and highly unique [5]. The advantages of microscopy are numerous: it is possible to differentiate between species, quantify parasitaemia and observe asexual stages of the parasites [1, 5]. Although microscopy has good sensitivity and allows species identification and parasite counts it requires microscopical expertise and is a labour intensive repetitive task which is time consuming. The significance of malaria as a global health problem and the importance of laboratory diagnosis in malaria control, lack of nonmicroscopic methods of diagnosis and the problems inherent to microscopy prompted us to develop a method by which one can automate the process of parasite detection in stain blood films. Most of the reported work is dedicated to malaria parasite segmentation or detection [10-15]. This paper presents a hybrid approach to classify parasite using fusion of texture and intensity features. MATLAB 7.01, its image processing toolbox is used for feature extraction and ANN toolbox has been used for classification.

2. Overview of Features Extraction

Feature selection is one of the most important tasks which allow determining the most relevant features for pattern recognition. A suitable subset of features is found when it permits synthesizing the similarity of the pattern within its class and dissimilarity amongst other different classes. The goal of feature selection is to 4

International Journal of Computational Intelligence and Information Security, December 2011 Vol. 2, No. 12 reduce the dimensionality of vectors associated to patterns selecting a subset of attributes smaller than the original. The classifier performance is often improved by eliminating redundant features. Hence the purpose of feature generation is to compute new variables from the image array that concentrate information to separate classes. Intensity features are based only on the absolute value of the intensity measurements in the image. In pure intensity based measurements, the spatial positions of the pixels are not taken into account and all the information is thus retained in the histogram of the image. By intensity, we mean the intensity in a gray-scale image from which the histogram is obtained. The gray-scale image can be obtained using different channels of the original image or by applying different intensity conversions. Color histogram is not used directly as a feature, because it is in our case computed from the whole area of the cell which may contain pixels of the cell, pixels of the parasite, and even pixels with the intensity of the background in the centres of the cells. Another set of features which we used to describe a medical image is texture feature. Medical images possess different texture depending upon area of body considered for imaging. Texture perception has a very important aspect in the human visual system of recognition and interpretation. Two main approaches concerning with texture analysis are statistical model-based and spectral measure. We use Haralicks texture features [17] such as energy, entropy. The gray-scale images are obtained from the red, green, blue, saturation and value components of the original image. Although First order features (Mean, Standard Deviation, Skewness, Kurtosis, Energy and Entropy) [13, 14], based on the image histograms are used.

Where, P (b) is the first-order histogram estimate, Parameter b is the pixel amplitude value. L is the upper limit of the quantized amplitude level. Finally, is the standard deviation. The mean gives an estimate of the average intensity level in the region of the cell and the variance is a measure of the dispersion of region intensity. Histogram skewness is a measure of histogram symmetry and it shows the percentage of the region's pixels that favor intensities on either side of the mean. Kurtosis is a measure of the tail of the histogram. A high kurtosis histogram has a sharper peak and longer tails, while a low kurtosis histogram has a more rounded peak and shorter thinner tail.

3. Experiments and Results 3.1 Preparation of Training and Testing Data Set
90 blood images consisting of 60 with malaria parasite and 30 without parasite were collected from open source database and some hospitals. Figure 1 shows some sample images from the database. Before feature extraction, region of interest (ROI) Consisting of infected erythrocytes was extracted using MATLAB imtool function for further analysis Thereafter images in the training data set were converted to Gray scale Intensity maps from their original RGB format, to reduce the dimensionality of the input matrices to the ANN. Figure 2 5

International Journal of Computational Intelligence and Information Security, December 2011 Vol. 2, No. 12 shows extracted ROIs from some images from database. The training data set of an ANN contains the first order feature values which best describes the pattern. Table I gives the results of first order features of different parasite affected blood cells.First order features (Mean, Standard Deviation, Skewness, Kurtosis, Energy and Entropy), based on the image histograms are used.

Figure 1: Example images from the database

Figure 2: Extracted ROI consisting of Infected RBCs before feature extraction. Table I Texture and Intensity Features of Different Parasite Affected and Non-Affected Blood Cells
S. No 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. Intensity Feature Mean Variance Skewness Kurtosis Energy Entropy Simple RBC 6.8972 5.5766 -1.8530 5.0930 0.2983 1.3009 P.falci param 7.6138 1.1776 -4.8723 29.574 6 0.5935 0.7328 p.malarie p.ovale

7.0064 2.2837 -2.4107 10.0099 0.3026 1.4078

7.2485 2.3814 -2.1044 9.3526 0.2518 1.5329

3.2 ANN based classification using Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm

The classification of an erythrocyte as infected with malaria or not is accomplished by Back propagation feed forward (BFF) neural network. BFF neural network architecture developed by Paul Werbos was chosen as it was 6

International Journal of Computational Intelligence and Information Security, December 2011 Vol. 2, No. 12 a simple and one of the most commonly used ANNs [16].

Figure 3: Simple feed forward neural network

The right structure of the selected network reduces not only the training time but also significantly impacts the generalization and representational capabilities of the trained network. The number of hidden layers and the number of neurons per layer were considered after series of trails it was decided that the network has three layers (one hidden layer). The final determination of the neural network requires the relevant transfer functions to be established. After analysing the various possible combinations of transfer functions usually used, such as logsig, tansig and linear functions, the tansig function was chosen as transfer function for the hidden layer and output layer. Various networks with different number of neurons in their hidden layer were trained with Back Propagation algorithm and Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm. The LM algorithm is a nonlinear least square algorithm applied to learning of the multilayer neurons. It was found that the networks trained with the LM algorithm provide better results compared with the results of the networks trained with the BP algorithm. Therefore, it was decided to use the LM training algorithm for this application.

3.3 Training with Levenberg-Marquardt Algorithm

50% of the data has been used for training and remaining 50% was used for testing and validation. Fig.4 below shows performance of the training of the input data and target data sets. Fig.4 shows the corresponding RMS error of the ANN based Classifier with the pre-processed training sets. As can be seen, the ANN output error rapidly converges to the desired level. It has been found that a single hidden layer network with 5 neurons in hidden layer and 1 neurons in output layer (6-5-1) is capable of minimizing the mean square error (mse) to a final value of 0.0000571206. Mean square error is the average squared difference between outputs and targets. Lower values are better, zero means no error. This learning strategy converges quickly. One can see that during learning the mse decreases in 8 cycles to 0.0000571206. Fig. 5 shows the Regression plot for the output with respect to target data. Regression R values measure the correlation between outputs and targets. An R value of 1 means a close relationship and 0 means a random relationship. In Fig 5 output tracks the targets very well and R value is over 0.9. For testing and validation, remaining 50% data are divided into two parts. Fig. 4 shows the training graph of neural network using LevenbergMarquardt algorithm. Fig. 6 below shows the testing result graph. From this it is clear that one error has occurred in the pattern sets i.e. one data id wrongly classified by the classifier. Fig.7 below shows graph of validation.

International Journal of Computational Intelligence and Information Security, December 2011 Vol. 2, No. 12

Figure 4: Training figure obtained with Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm for ANN classifier

Figure 5: Regression plot for the output with respect to target data

Figure 6: Result of Testing of Neural Network Using 25% of dataset

International Journal of Computational Intelligence and Information Security, December 2011 Vol. 2, No. 12

Figure 7: Result of Validation of Neural Network Using 25% of dataset

4. Conclusion
In this paper an automatic method for classification between parasite infected and non-infected erythrocytes using Texture and Intensity features is proposed. After extracting features, a one dimensional feature consisting of Texture and intensity attributes was used for training and testing. Back-propagation feed forward NN with LevenbergMarquardt algorithm was used for training, testing and classification. Results show that these features can give satisfactory result in analysis and classification of malaria parasite. The proposed algorithm for ANN based malaria parasite classification achieves 94 percent accuracy.

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