Diagnosis of malaria disease by integrating chi-square feature selection algorithm with convolutional neural networks and autoencoder network

Malaria is a febrile illness caused by a parasite called plasmodium. This life-threatening disease is preventable and treatable if diagnosed early. The World Health Organization aims to reduce the global malaria incidence and death rates by at least 90% until 2030. This disease is diagnosed by visually analyzing red blood cells with a microscope by experienced radiologists. Therefore, this situation may be erroneous due to subjective interpretations. In this study, red blood cells were trained with deep learning–based convolutional neural networks to diagnose malaria, and thus, their deep features were obtained. These obtained features are also trained with autoencoder networks. Thus, the chi-square feature selection algorithm was used to obtain distinctive features. Finally, the unique feature set obtained is given as an introduction to machine learning algorithms, and then a unique diagnostic model is proposed. As a result, 100% accuracy rate was obtained. The results are promising for the diagnosis of malaria disease.