An intelligent detection method for plasmodium based on self-supervised learning and attention mechanism

BACKGROUND: Malaria remains a severe life-threatening disease caused by plasmodium parasites. Microscopy is widely used for malaria diagnosis. However, it relies heavily on the skills and experience of inspectors. Due to low-level medical services and the lack of skilled inspectors, misdiagnoses are frequently made in some areas. METHODS: In recent years, many successful applications of CNN models have been reported. Unlike images in the ImageNet, the image of plasmodium only has a tiny defect area with a large amount of information. In addition, the dataset is extremely unbalanced: the number of positive samples is much less than that of negative samples. This paper proposes a classification network by combining attention mechanism and ResNeSt for plasmodium detection and using self-supervised learning to pre-train the network. First, the positive samples were adopted to pre-train the network. Then, attention modules were taken to highlight the feature area. To support current and future research, we also constructed a plasmodium dataset with Plasmodium falciparum, Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium ovale, and Plasmodium malaria and non-Plasmodium. Through self-supervised learning, a large amount of unlabeled data is used to mine the representational features, thus improving the feature extraction capability of the model and achieving higher accuracy, while saving the physician’s labeling time and improving the classification accuracy. RESULTS: The experiments show that our model exhibits an excellent performance and that the test accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity attain 97.8%, 96.5%, and 98.9%, respectively. CONCLUSION: The AI classification method proposed in this paper can effectively assist clinicians in the diagnosis and provide a basis for the automatic detection of malaria parasites in the future.