Empirical Analysis of a Fine-Tuned Deep Convolutional Model in Classifying and Detecting Malaria Parasites from Blood Smears

In this work, we empirically evaluated the efficiency of the recent EfficientNetB0 model to identify and diagnose malaria parasite infections in blood smears. The dataset used was collected and classified by relevant experts from the Lister Hill National Centre for Biomedical Communications (LHNCBC). We prepared our samples with minimal image transformations as opposed to others, as we focused more on the feature extraction capability of the EfficientNetB0 baseline model. We applied transfer learning to increase the initial feature sets and reduced the training time to train our model. We then fine-tuned it to work with our proposed layers and re-trained the entire model to learn from our prepared dataset. The highest overall accuracy attained from our evaluated results was 94.70% from fifty epochs and followed by 94.68% within just ten. Additional visualization and analysis using the Gradient weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) algorithm visualized how effectively our fine-tuned EfficientNetB0 detected infections better than other recent state-of-the-art DCNN models. This study, therefore, concludes that when fine-tuned, the recent EfficientNetB0 will generate highly accurate deep learning solutions for the identification of malaria parasites in blood smears without the need for stringent pre-processing, optimization, or data augmentation of images.