AI revolutionizes malaria diagnosis with 97.57% accuracy using EfficientNet

Published

11 months ago

June 13, 2024

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By Dr. Chinta Sidharthan Jun 12 2024 Reviewed by Lily Ramsey, LLM

In a recent study published in Scientific Reports, a team of researchers proposed using an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that uses deep learning to examine red blood cell images in blood smears for the timely detection of malaria.

Study: Efficient deep learning-based approach for malaria detection using red blood cell smears . Image Credit: cones/Shutterstock.com Background

The World Health Organization report from 2015 shows that in subtropical and tropical regions of the world, the parasite of the genus Plasmodium that causes malaria was responsible for over 400,000 deaths.

Malaria is usually detected through microscopic analysis of blood smear slides, which reveal infected erythrocytes or red blood cells.

Given that regions in Africa, South East Asia, and the Mediterranean experience over 70% of malaria cases, the process of detecting malaria through blood smears becomes very laborious and significantly increases the pathologist’s workload.

AI-based tools involving machine learning and deep-learning approaches have been widely explored in recent studies for automated screening and applications in clinical diagnoses.

However, traditional AI approaches such as neural networks have faced challenges in detecting and identifying malarial parasites in blood smears due to the small size and substantial disparity in blood cells.

Furthermore, these methods still require qualified pathologists for feature vector extraction, making it difficult to automate the screening and detection process completely. About the study

In the present study, the researchers proposed a deep-learning-based AI tool to detect malaria from images of red blood cells accurately. They also compared the proposed EfficientNet-B2 model against other deep-learning models and used ten-fold cross-validation for efficacy validation. Related StoriesUsing AI to revolutionize mosquito surveillance to help combat malaria in AfricaAfrican regions at risk for malaria transmission may decline more than previously expectedMinisters of Health commit to accelerated action against malaria in Africa

A dataset consisting of 27,558 blood cell images, of which half were those from uninfected individuals and the other half had parasitized cells, was used in the study. Expert pathologists manually annotated the images.

The preprocessing step involved resizing the images to standardize the size of the images since the model necessitates that the size of the input be fixed or equal.

The images were then split into training and test datasets. The researchers used 80% of the images as the training dataset, while the remaining were used to test the performance and efficacy of the model.

The deep-learning model EfficientNet-B2 used in this study was a Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) model, which has been widely employed for problems involving image classification.

The model provides accurate classification results by efficiently scaling the images using depth-wise separable convolutions. An added benefit is the small size of the model, requiring lower computing resources.

The researchers used batch normalization to increase the accuracy of the model. This process calculates the mean and standard deviation of each feature using a smaller dataset, which is then used to standardize the input.

A set of classifications for blood cell images obtained from experts was employed to train the deep-learning model to recognize symptoms of malaria.

The study also compared the performance of numerous pre-trained models such as CNN, Visual Geometry Group (VGG16), Inception, DenseNet121, MobileNet, and ResNet, compared to the deep-learning model proposed in this study.

Some of the measures along which the performance of these models was evaluated included false positive, false negative, true positive, and true negative rates, as well as precision, accuracy, and recall. Results

The study showed that the model proposed in the present study had higher accuracy, area under the curve (AUC), precision, and F1 value, which is the average of precision and recall, compared to the other pre-trained models. Additionally, the testing loss for the proposed model was lower than that of the other models.

After 80% of the dataset was used to train the model, testing the model on the remaining 20% provided an accuracy score of 0.9757, which was higher than the accuracy score obtained when 90% of the dataset was used for the training.

Furthermore, the ten-fold cross-validation indicated that the detection of malaria by the proposed model was highly accurate, with high recall and AUC scores and exceptionally low testing loss.

The model exhibited 98.59% accuracy in detecting cells containing parasites, while the detection of uninfected cells was found to be 100% accurate from the results of the confusion matrix. Conclusions

Overall, the study showed that the proposed model EfficientNet-B2 exhibited high accuracy and precision in detecting symptoms of malaria from images of blood cells obtained from blood smears. The model outperformed the other existing deep-learning-based models in all the performance parameters.

The researchers believe this model could be employed to improve the accuracy of malaria detection from blood smear samples and significantly reduce the workload of pathologists. Journal reference:

Mujahid, M., Rustam, F., Shafique, R., Montero, E. C., Alvarado, E. S., Isabel, & Ashraf, I. (2024). Efficient deep learning-based approach for malaria detection using red blood cell smears. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 13249. doi:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598024638310. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-63831-0

UK

VE Day: Veterans to join King for tea party as Keir Starmer praises ‘selfless dedication’

Published

2 hours ago

May 5, 2025

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VE Day: Veterans to join King for tea party as Keir Starmer praises 'selfless dedication'

Veterans are set to join the King for a VE Day tea party today as the prime minister has paid tribute to the “selfless dedication” of the war generation.

Among them will be a 99-year-old who took part in the D-Day landings and a 100-year-old woman who worked in the Special Operations Executive, known as Churchill’s Secret Army.

Director general of the Royal British Legion, Mark Atkinson, said the charity was “proud” to be taking a place “at the heart of these national celebrations and commemorations” on the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.

He said it would be “one of our last opportunities as a nation to pay tribute to those veterans still with us today”.

Evacuees from World War Two and veterans who were still in active conflict after VE Day are among the other guests set to attend the tea party, which will take place in the presence of the King and other members of the Royal Family.

At 12pm, the Royal Family will observe a military procession, followed by a flypast.

It will be the first major VE Day anniversary without any of the royals who stood on the balcony of Buckingham Palace on the day victory in Europe was declared, after the death of the late Queen Elizabeth II in 2022.

‘Not just for Britain’

The celebrations come as Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer praised veterans for their “selfless dedication” and thanked them for a “debt that can never fully be repaid” in an open letter ahead of VE Day.

He said the stories which will be heard this week from those who fought in the Second World War would be a reminder that the victory “was not just for Britain” but was also “a victory for good against the assembled forces of hatred, tyranny and evil”.

Sir Keir said the WW2 veterans “represent the best of who we are” and that without their service “the freedom, peace and joy that these celebrations embody, would not be possible”.

Personnel from NATO allies the US, France and Germany will be among those taking part in the procession in London.

The commemorations will begin with the words of Sir Winston Churchill‘s 1945 victory speech, spoken by actor Timothy Spall.

Thousands of people are expected to line the streets of the capital to witness the celebrations.

On the anniversary itself on Thursday, marking exactly 80 years since the Allies formally accepted Germany’s surrender, a service of commemoration will be held at Westminster Abbey, to include a national two minutes’ silence.

Pubs across England and Wales, which usually close at 11pm, will also stay open for an extra two hours to allow punters more time to celebrate.

Sports

Logano gets 1st win this season in OT at Texas

Published

2 hours ago

May 5, 2025

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Logano gets 1st win this season in OT at Texas

Associated Press

May 4, 2025, 09:23 PM ET

FORT WORTH, Texas — Reigning NASCAR Cup champion Joey Logano overcame a lot to get his first victory this season.

It came a week after Team Penske teammate Austin Cindric‘s win at Talladega, where Logano had a fifth-place finish that became 39th after a postrace inspection found an issue with the spoiler on his No. 22 Ford. There was also Logano’s expletive-laden rant on the radio toward his teammate in the middle of that race that the two smoothed out during the week. Oh, and he started 27th at Texas after a bad qualifying effort on the 1½-mile track.

But Logano surged ahead on the restart in overtime Sunday to win in the 11th race this year. He led only seven of the 271 laps, four more than scheduled.

“After what happened last week, to be able to rebound and come right back, it’s a total ’22’ way of doing things. So proud of the team,” Logano said.

On the final restart after the 12th caution, Logano was on the inside of his other teammate, Ryan Blaney. But Logano pulled away on the backstretch and stayed easily in front for the final 1½ laps, while Ross Chastain then passed Blaney to finish second ahead of him.

“Just slowly, methodically,” Logano said of his progression to the front. “Just kept grinding, a couple here and a couple there and eventually get a win here.”

Logano got his 37th career victory, getting the lead for the first time on Lap 264. He went low to complete a pass of Michael McDowell.

“I mean, there’s always a story next week, right?” Logano said. “So I told my wife last week before we left, I said, ‘Watch me go win this one.’ It’s just how we do stuff.”

On a caution with 47 laps left, McDowell took only two tires and moved up 15 spots to second. He ended up leading 19 laps, but got loose a few laps after getting passed by Logano and crashed to bring out the caution that sent the race to overtime. He finished 26th.

“We were giving it everything we had there to try to keep track position,” McDowell said. “Joey got a run there, and I tried to block it. I went as far as I think you could probably go. When Blaney slid in front of me, it just took the air off of it and I just lost the back of it. I still had the fight in me, but I probably should have conceded at that point.”

Odds and Ends

William Byron, Kyle Larson, Denny Hamlin and Chase Elliott remained the top four in season points. … Elliott left Texas last spring with his first victory after 42 races and 18 months without one. He hasn’t won since, and now has another long winless drought — this one 38 races and nearly 13 months after finishing 16th. … A crew member for Christopher Bell crawled in through the passenger side of the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota and was fully in the car to reconnect an air hose to the driver’s helmet during a caution in the second stage. It took two stops during that caution, and twice climbing into the car, to resolve the issue.

Fiery end to Hamlin streak

Hamlin had finished on the lead lap in 21 consecutive races, but a fiery finish on Lap 75 ended that streak that had matched the eighth longest in NASCAR history. He was the first car out of the race.

After the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota lost power, something blew up when Hamlin recycled the engine. Flames were coming from under the car and it was engulfed in smoke when it rolled to a stop on the inside of the track, and Hamlin climbed out unharmed.

Youngest pole sitter

Carson Hocevar, the 22-year-old driver who is McDowell’s teammate with Spire Motorsports, was the youngest pole sitter in Texas. He led only the first 22 laps of the race, losing it while pitting during the first caution. He finished 24th after a late accident.

Stage cautions

Both in-race stages finished under caution. Cindric won Stage 1 after Hamlin’s issues, and Kyle Larson took the second after a yellow flag came out because of debris on the track after the right rear tire on Chris Buescher‘s car came apart.

Larson got his 68th overall stage win and his sixth at Texas, with both marks being records. He has won a stage in each of the past five Cup races at Texas, starting in his 2021 win there.

US

Trump calls for reopening of Alcatraz to house ‘most ruthless and violent offenders’

Published

4 hours ago

May 5, 2025

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Trump calls for reopening of Alcatraz to house 'most ruthless and violent offenders'

US President Donald Trump has called for the reopening of notorious prison Alcatraz.

In a post on his social media site Truth Social, Mr Trump said America had been “plagued by vicious, violent, and repeat criminal offenders”.

He added that when the United States was “a more serious nation” it “did not hesitate to lock up the most dangerous criminals”.

“That is why, today, I am directing the Bureau of Prisons, together with the Department of Justice, FBI, and Homeland Security, to reopen a substantially enlarged and rebuilt Alcatraz, to house America’s most ruthless and violent offenders,” he wrote.

Mr Trump said the reopening of the San Francisco prison would “serve as a symbol of law, order, and justice”.

The US president’s latest policy announcement comes after he fired national security adviser Mike Waltz last week in the first major change to his administration.

Alcatraz was infamously inescapable and in the 29 years it was open, 36 men attempted 14 separate escapes, according to the FBI.

Nearly all of them were caught or did not survive the attempt at escaping.

The prison housed some of America’s most notorious criminals, including Al Capone and George Kelly.

It has also been the subject of a number of films, including The Rock, starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage.

Alcatraz Island, which is surrounded by strong ocean currents and cold Pacific waters, is now a major tourist site, operated by the National Park Service.

The prison’s closure in 1963 was attributed to crumbling infrastructure and high repair costs.

A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons said it would “comply with all presidential orders”.

The Bureau of Prisons currently has 16 high-security prisons, including its maximum-security facility in Florence, Colorado, and a facility in Terre Haute, Indiana, which is home to the federal death chamber.

The United States’ federal law enforcement agency has been the subject of increased scrutiny in recent years after Jeffrey Epstein‘s suicide at a federal jail in New York City in 2019.