A Python (Open CV) Based Automatic Tool for Parasitemia Calcuation in Peripheral Blood Smear

Malaria represent a serious public health problem of humans and animals worldwide. Malaria is endemic in more than 100 countries while majority of the cases occurs in tropic countries. Estimation of parasitemia (in stained blood smears) is an important parameter in malaria diagnosis and malaria research, however is being perform manually since binging, which is a time consuming method. In contrast this study proposes a Python (Open CV) bases image processing tool for easy, user friendly, accurate and cost effective calculation of parasitemia. During this process, initially the malaria positive blood smear image was acquired and a Python Code for Image Processing was developed which includes image decomposition, cell size estimation, morphological transformation and parasitemia calculation. Proposed tool resulted in 7.42% of parasitemia which in contrast to manual calculation (6.42% parasitemia), 90.00% accurate. Based on the above observations it can be concluded that the Python based image processing tool is a very effective approach of rapid calculation of parasitemia.