
Using deep learning to detect malaria in images - mwakanosya
https://blog.insightdatascience.com/https-blog-insightdatascience-com-malaria-hero-a47d3d5fc4bb
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uxhacker
This is really important. I caught Malaria in Ghana, but the symptoms did not
develop until I was in the UK. The hospital wanted to identify the type of
Malaria I had before treating me, which I think was a mistake. In Ghana they
take a blood sample and then immediately start treatment. The treatment can
always be altered if the strand is different from the best course of action.

But the issue was they had a hard time identifying the type because I did not
have one type of Malaria but two. In a hospital in the temperate world they do
not have the cases to gather the skills to be able to quickly identify the
strand.

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cenal
Shameless but relevant plug.

I co-founded a startup with Mark Plaskow earlier this year to help make
hematological analysis including detection of parasites more accurate and
affordable. Mark has been doing image based detection of parasites for years
and is published here:
[https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/14...](https://malariajournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1475-2875-11-155)

There are various issues with capturing images of this quality level in the
field. It’s something we have made a lot of progress on.

We hope our devices can have an outsized impact in these regions.

If anyone reading is interested in our work we have a teaser page live at
[http://www.paean.io](http://www.paean.io) and can be reached by email using
info@paean.io

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killjoywashere
Thanks for posting, I've been looking into this space. Have you looked at the
College of American Pathologists Blood Parasites survey? The organisms one may
encounter in the peripheral smear of a patient with fevers in the tropics is
not limited to malaria (filariasis, babesiosis, etc). How are you dealing with
those?

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cenal
We believe that our solution can automate the work Doctors do with
microscopes.

This isn’t limited to one parasite.

We can provide a demo today of our robotics that can automate these tests.

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malydok
This is the kind of thing I'm expecting to see more of coming from the ML
field. Orgs fighting malaria should take these efforts into consideration,
back them, develop ever more robust tools. Which might already be happening, I
don't know.

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amelius
> I found a great dataset that consists of 27,558 single cell images with an
> equal number of infected and uninfected cells.

This seems to be the key of the article. I wonder how the author would have
proceeded without this data-set and if they would have been able to build
anything useful at all without it.

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DoctorOetker
Great work, you might consider not just feedback from experts, but also from
the patients themselves, perhaps if they have their own cell phone they can
report feeling sick, or testify they did not get sick etc...

