A novel transfer learning-based model for diagnosing malaria from parasitized and uninfected red blood cell images

Malaria represents a potentially fatal communicable illness triggered by the Plasmodium parasite. This disease is transmitted to humans through the bites of Anopheles mosquitoes that carry the infection. This disease has significant and devastating consequences on the health systems of fragile countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Malaria affects red blood cells by invading and replicating within them, destroying them, and releasing toxic byproducts into the bloodstream. The parasite's ability to stick and modify the surface of red blood cells can cause them to become sticky, obstructing blood flow in vital organs such as the brain and spleen. Therefore, efficient approaches for the early detection of malaria are critical to saving patients' lives. The main aim of this study is to develop an efficient model for early malaria diagnosis. We used malaria images based on parasitized and uninfected red blood cells for the study experiments. We applied neural network-based approaches such as Neural Search Architecture Network (NASNet) and compared its performance with machine learning techniques. Moreover, we proposed a novel NNR (NASNet Random forest) method for feature engineering. The proposed NNR approach first extracts spatial features from input malaria images, then class prediction probability features are extracted from these spatial features. The feature set obtained from the data extraction trains machine learning models. Our comprehensive experiments show that the support vector machine outperformed state-of-the-art models, achieving a high-performance score of 99% and having an inference time near 0.025 s. We validated the performance using k-fold cross-validation and optimized the hyperparameters through tuning. Our proposed research has improved the early diagnosis of malaria and can assist medical specialists in reducing the mortality rate.