{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,12,22]],"date-time":"2025-12-22T12:54:57Z","timestamp":1766408097491,"version":"build-2065373602"},"reference-count":20,"publisher":"MDPI AG","issue":"10","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2017,9,21]],"date-time":"2017-09-21T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1505952000000},"content-version":"vor","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), Portugal 2020 and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) from European Union","award":["'Deus ex Machina - Symbiotic Technology for Societal Efficiency Gains' - NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000026."],"award-info":[{"award-number":["'Deus ex Machina - Symbiotic Technology for Societal Efficiency Gains' - NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000026."]}]}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["Sensors"],"abstract":"<jats:p>Microscopy examination has been the pillar of malaria diagnosis, being the recommended procedure when its quality can be maintained. However, the need for trained personnel and adequate equipment limits its availability and accessibility in malaria-endemic areas. Rapid, accurate, accessible diagnostic tools are increasingly required, as malaria control programs extend parasite-based diagnosis and the prevalence decreases. This paper presents an image processing and analysis methodology using supervised classification to assess the presence of malaria parasites and determine the species and life cycle stage in Giemsa-stained thin blood smears. The main differentiation factor is the usage of microscopic images exclusively acquired with low cost and accessible tools such as smartphones, a dataset of 566 images manually annotated by an experienced parasilogist being used. Eight different species-stage combinations were considered in this work, with an automatic detection performance ranging from 73.9% to 96.2% in terms of sensitivity and from 92.6% to 99.3% in terms of specificity. These promising results attest to the potential of using this approach as a valid alternative to conventional microscopy examination, with comparable detection performances and acceptable computational times.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3390\/s17102167","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2017,9,21]],"date-time":"2017-09-21T12:17:40Z","timestamp":1505996260000},"page":"2167","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/mdpi_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":42,"title":["Mobile-Based Analysis of Malaria-Infected Thin Blood Smears: Automated Species and Life Cycle Stage Determination"],"prefix":"10.3390","volume":"17","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-8060-831X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Lu\u00eds","family":"Rosado","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS, Rua Alfredo Allen 455\/461, 4200-135 Porto, Portugal"}]},{"given":"Jos\u00e9","family":"Da Costa","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Instituto Nacional de Sa\u00fade Dr. Ricardo Jorge, Rua Alexandre Herculano 321, 4000-055 Porto, Portugal"}]},{"given":"Dirk","family":"Elias","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Fraunhofer Portugal AICOS, Rua Alfredo Allen 455\/461, 4200-135 Porto, Portugal"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-3760-2473","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Jaime","family":"Cardoso","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"INESC TEC (Institute for Systems and Computer Engineering, Technology and Science) and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, 4200-465 Porto, Portugal"}]}],"member":"1968","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2017,9,21]]},"reference":[{"key":"ref_1","unstructured":"World Health Organization (2016). World Malaria Report 2016, WHO."},{"key":"ref_2","unstructured":"World Health Organization (2015). World Malaria Report 2015, WHO."},{"key":"ref_3","unstructured":"Blycroft Limited (2014). Africa & Middle East Mobile Factbook 2Q 2014, Blycroft Publishing."},{"key":"ref_4","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"37","DOI":"10.1109\/MSPEC.2015.6995631","article-title":"Portable pathology for Africa","volume":"52","author":"Dolgin","year":"2015","journal-title":"IEEE Spectr."},{"key":"ref_5","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"11","DOI":"10.2174\/221135251401160302121107","article-title":"A Review of Automatic Malaria Parasites Detection and Segmentation in Microscopic Images","volume":"14","author":"Rosado","year":"2016","journal-title":"Anti-Infect. Agents"},{"key":"ref_6","unstructured":"World Health Organization (2010). Basic Malaria Microscopy: Part II. Tutor\u2019s guide, WHO. [2nd ed.]."},{"key":"ref_7","unstructured":"Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2017). Malaria Diagnosis (U.S.)\u2014Rapid Diagnostic Test."},{"key":"ref_8","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Zou, L.H., Chen, J., Zhang, J., and Garcia, N. (2010, January 2\u20133). Malaria Cell Counting Diagnosis within Large Field of View. Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (DICTA), Sydney, Australia.","DOI":"10.1109\/DICTA.2010.40"},{"key":"ref_9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Anggraini, D., Nugroho, A., Pratama, C., Rozi, I., Pragesjvara, V., and Gunawan, M. (2011, January 17\u201318). Automated status identification of microscopic images obtained from malaria thin blood smears using bayes decision: A study case in plasmodium falciparum. Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Advanced Computer Science and Information System (ICACSIS), Jakarta, Indonesia.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICEEI.2011.6021762"},{"key":"ref_10","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Malihi, L., Ansari-Asl, K., and Behbahani, A. (2013, January 10\u201312). Malaria parasite detection in giemsa-stained blood cell images. Proceedings of the 2013 8th Iranian Conference on Machine Vision and Image Processing (MVIP), Zanjan, Iran.","DOI":"10.1109\/IranianMVIP.2013.6780011"},{"key":"ref_11","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Khan, N., Pervaz, H., Latif, A., Musharraf, A. (2014, January 14\u201316). Unsupervised identification of malaria parasites using computer vision. Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (JCSSE), Chon Buri, Thailand.","DOI":"10.1109\/JCSSE.2014.6841878"},{"key":"ref_12","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Nugroho, H.A., Akbar, S.A., and Murhandarwati, E.E.H. (2015, January 16\u201318). Feature extraction and classification for detection malaria parasites in thin blood smear. Proceedings of the 2015 2nd International Conference on Information Technology, Computer, and Electrical Engineering (ICITACEE), Semarang, Indonesia.","DOI":"10.1109\/ICITACEE.2015.7437798"},{"key":"ref_13","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Nanoti, A., Jain, S., Gupta, C., and Vyas, G. (2016, January 26\u201327). Detection of malaria parasite species and life cycle stages using microscopic images of thin blood smear. Proceedings of the 2016 International Conference on Inventive Computation Technologies (ICICT), Coimbatore, India.","DOI":"10.1109\/INVENTIVE.2016.7823258"},{"key":"ref_14","first-page":"1","article-title":"A portable image-based cytometer for rapid malaria detection and quantification","volume":"12","author":"Yang","year":"2017","journal-title":"PLoS ONE"},{"key":"ref_15","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Rosado, L., Oliveira, J., Vasconcelos, M.J.M., da Costa, J.M.C., Elias, D., and Cardoso, J.S. (2017, January 21\u201323). \u03bcSmartScope: 3D-printed Smartphone Microscope with Motorized Automated Stage. Proceedings of the 10th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies, Porto, Portugal.","DOI":"10.5220\/0006155800380048"},{"key":"ref_16","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"138","DOI":"10.1016\/j.procs.2016.07.024","article-title":"Automated Detection of Malaria Parasites on Thick Blood Smears via Mobile Devices","volume":"90","author":"Rosado","year":"2016","journal-title":"Proc. Comput. Sci."},{"key":"ref_17","unstructured":"Fang, Y., Xiong, W., Lin, W., and Chen, Z. (September, January 20). Unsupervised malaria parasite detection based on phase spectrum. Proceedings of the 2011 Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, Boston, MA, USA."},{"key":"ref_18","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"622","DOI":"10.1109\/LGRS.2013.2272574","article-title":"Optimization of Segmentation Algorithms Through Mean-Shift Filtering Preprocessing","volume":"11","author":"Wang","year":"2014","journal-title":"IEEE Geosci. Remote Sens. Lett."},{"key":"ref_19","unstructured":"Baron, S. (1996). Malaria. Medical Microbiology, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. [4th ed.]."},{"key":"ref_20","first-page":"120","article-title":"The OpenCV Library","volume":"25","author":"Bradski","year":"2000","journal-title":"Dr. Dobb\u2019s J. Softw. Tools"}],"container-title":["Sensors"],"original-title":[],"language":"en","link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1424-8220\/17\/10\/2167\/pdf","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,10,11]],"date-time":"2025-10-11T18:45:35Z","timestamp":1760208335000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/www.mdpi.com\/1424-8220\/17\/10\/2167"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2017,9,21]]},"references-count":20,"journal-issue":{"issue":"10","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2017,10]]}},"alternative-id":["s17102167"],"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3390\/s17102167","relation":{},"ISSN":["1424-8220"],"issn-type":[{"type":"electronic","value":"1424-8220"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2017,9,21]]}}}