Malaria Disease Cell Classification With Highlighting Small Infected Regions

Deep learning-based methods have become an active research area in medical imaging. Malaria is diagnosed by testing red blood cells. Deep learning methods can be used to distinguish malaria infected cell images from non-infected cell images. The small number of malaria dataset may limit the application of deep learning. Moreover, the infected area in the cell images is generally vague and small, requiring more complex models and a larger dataset to train on. Motivated by the tendency of humans to highlight important words when reading, we propose a simple neural network training strategy for highlighting the infected pixel regions that are mainly responsible for malaria cell classification. In our experiments on the NIH(National Institutes of Health) malaria dataset available in public domain, the proposed method significantly improved classification accuracy for our four different sized models, ranging from simple to complex including Resnet and Mobilenet. Our proposed method significantly improved classification accuracy. The result indicate that approach achieves a classification accuracy of 97.2%, compared to 94.49% for a baseline model. In addition, we show the superiority of the proposed strategy by providing an analysis on the magnitude of weight parameters in terms of regularization.