PlasmoID: A dataset for Indonesian malaria parasite detection and segmentation in thin blood smear

Indonesia holds the second-highest-ranking country for the highest number of malaria cases in Southeast Asia. A different malaria parasite semantic segmentation technique based on a deep learning approach is an alternative to reduce the limitations of traditional methods. However, the main problem of the semantic segmentation technique is raised since large parasites are dominant, and the tiny parasites are suppressed. In addition, the amount and variance of data are important influences in establishing their models. In this study, we conduct two contributions. First, we collect 559 microscopic images containing 691 malaria parasites of thin blood smears. The dataset is named PlasmoID, and most data comes from rural Indonesia. PlasmoID also provides ground truth for parasite detection and segmentation purposes. Second, this study proposes a malaria parasite segmentation and detection scheme by combining Faster RCNN and a semantic segmentation technique. The proposed scheme has been evaluated on the PlasmoID dataset. It has been compared with recent studies of semantic segmentation techniques, namely UNet, ResFCN-18, DeepLabV3, DeepLabV3plus and ResUNet-18. The result shows that our proposed scheme can improve the segmentation and detection of malaria parasite performance compared to original semantic segmentation techniques.

Hanung Adi Nugroho, Rizki Nurfauzi, E. Elsa Herdiana Murhandarwati, Purwono Purwono · 2022