Background Manual microscopic examination of Leishman/Giemsa stained thin and thick blood smear is still the “gold standard” for malaria diagnosis. One of the drawbacks of this method is that its accuracy, consistency, and diagnosis speed depend on microscopists’ diagnostic and technical skills. It is difficult to get highly skilled microscopists in remote areas of developing countries. To alleviate this problem, in this paper, we propose to investigate state-of-the-art one-stage and two-stage object detection algorithms for automated malaria parasite screening from microscopic image of thick blood slides. Results YOLOV3 and YOLOV4 models, which are state-of-the-art object detectors in accuracy and speed, are not optimized for detecting small objects such as malaria parasites in microscopic images. We modify these models by increasing feature scale and adding more detection layers to enhance their capability of detecting small objects without notably decreasing detection speed. We propose one modified YOLOV4 model, called YOLOV4-MOD and two modified models of YOLOV3, which are called YOLOV3-MOD1 and YOLOV3-MOD2. Besides, new anchor box sizes are generated using K-means clustering algorithm to exploit the potential of these models in small object detection. The performance of the modified YOLOV3 and YOLOV4 models were evaluated on a publicly available malaria dataset. These models have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy by exceeding performance of their original versions, Faster R-CNN, and SSD in terms of mean average precision (mAP), recall, precision, F1 score, and average IOU. YOLOV4-MOD has achieved the best detection accuracy among all the other models with a mAP of 96.32%. YOLOV3-MOD2 and YOLOV3-MOD1 have achieved mAP of 96.14% and 95.46%, respectively. Conclusions The experimental results of this study demonstrate that performance of modified YOLOV3 and YOLOV4 models are highly promising for detecting malaria parasites from images captured by a smartphone camera over the microscope eyepiece. The proposed system is suitable for deployment in low-resource setting areas.

Amharic ("Image missing") is the official language of the Federal Government of Ethiopia, with more than 27 million speakers. It uses an Ethiopic script, which has 238 core and 27 labialized characters. It is a low-resourced language, and a few attempts have been made so far for its handwritten text recognition. However, Amharic handwritten text recognition is challenging due to the very high similarity between characters. This paper presents a convolutional recurrent neural networks based offline handwritten Amharic word recognition system. The proposed framework comprises convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for feature extraction from input word images, recurrent neural network (RNNs) for sequence encoding, and connectionist temporal classification as a loss function. We designed a custom CNN model and compared its performance with three different state-of-the-art CNN models, including DenseNet-121, ResNet-50 and VGG-19 after modifying their architectures to fit our problem domain, for robust feature extraction from handwritten Amharic word images. We have conducted detailed experiments with different CNN and RNN architectures, input word image sizes, and applied data augmentation techniques to enhance performance of the proposed models. We have prepared a handwritten Amharic word dataset, HARD-I, which is available publicly for researchers. From the experiments on various recognition models using our dataset, a WER of 5.24 % and CER of 1.15 % were achieved using our best-performing recognition model. The proposed models achieve a competitive performance compared to existing models for offline handwritten Amharic word recognition.

Background Information: Manual microscopic examination is still the ”golden standard” for malaria diagnosis. The challenge in the manual microscopy is the fact that its accuracy, consistency and speed of diagnosis depends on the skill of the laboratory technician. It is difficult to get highly skilled laboratory technicians in the remote areas of developing countries. In order to alleviate this problem, in this paper, we propose and investigate the state-of-the-art one-stage and two-stage object detection algorithms for automated malaria parasite screening from thick blood slides. Methods: YOLOV3 and YOLOV4 are state-of-the-art object detectors both in terms of accuracy and speed; however, they are not optimized for the detection of small objects such as malaria parasite in microscopic images. To deal with these challenges, we have modified YOLOV3 and YOLOV4 models by increasing the feature scale and by adding more detection layers, without notably decreasing their detection speed. We have proposed one modified YOLOV4 model, called YOLOV4-MOD and two modified models for YOLOV3, which are called YOLOV3-MOD1 and YOLOV3-MOD2. In addition, we have generated new anchor box scales and sizes by using the K-means clustering algorithm to exploit small object detection learning ability of the models. Results: The proposed modified YOLOV3 and YOLOV4 algorithms are evaluated on publicly available malaria dataset and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy by exceeding the performance of their original versions, Faster R-CNN and SSD in terms of mean average precision (mAP), recall, precision, F1 score, and average IOU. For 608 x 608 input resolution YOLOV4-MOD achieves the best detection performance among all the other models with mAP of 96.32%. For the same input resolution YOLOV3-MOD2 and YOLOV3-MOD1 achieved mAP of 96.14% and 95.46% respectively. Conclusions: Th experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed modified YOLOV3 and YOLOV4 models are reliable to be applied for detection of malaria parasite from images that can be captured by smartphone camera over the microscope eyepiece. The proposed system can be easily deployed in low-resource setting and it can save lives.

Background Automating cytology-based cervical cancer screening could alleviate the shortage of skilled pathologists in developing countries. Up until now, computer vision experts have attempted numerous semi and fully automated approaches to address the need. Yet, these days, leveraging the astonishing accuracy and reproducibility of deep neural networks has become common among computer vision experts. In this regard, the purpose of this study is to classify single-cell Pap smear (cytology) images using pre-trained deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) image classifiers. We have fine-tuned the top ten pre-trained DCNN image classifiers and evaluated them using five class single-cell Pap smear images from SIPaKMeD dataset. The pre-trained DCNN image classifiers were selected from Keras Applications based on their top 1% accuracy. Results Our experimental result demonstrated that from the selected top-ten pre-trained DCNN image classifiers DenseNet169 outperformed with an average accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score of 0.990, 0.974, 0.974, and 0.974, respectively. Moreover, it dashed the benchmark accuracy proposed by the creators of the dataset with 3.70%. Conclusions Even though the size of DenseNet169 is small compared to the experimented pre-trained DCNN image classifiers, yet, it is not suitable for mobile or edge devices. Further experimentation with mobile or small-size DCNN image classifiers is required to extend the applicability of the models in real-world demands. In addition, since all experiments used the SIPaKMeD dataset, additional experiments will be needed using new datasets to enhance the generalizability of the models.

Amharic language is an official language of the federal government of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. Accordingly, there is a bulk of handwritten Amharic documents available in libraries, information centres, museums, and offices. Digitization of these documents enables to harness already available language technologies to local information needs and developments. Converting these documents will have a lot of advantages including (i) to preserve and transfer history of the country (ii) to save storage space (ii) proper handling of documents (iv) enhance retrieval of information through internet and other applications. Handwritten Amharic character recognition system becomes a challenging task due to inconsistency of a writer, variability in writing styles of different writers, relatively large number of characters of the script, high interclass similarity, structural complexity and degradation of documents due to different reasons. In order to recognize handwritten Amharic character a novel method based on deep neural networks is used which has recently shown exceptional performance in various pattern recognition and machine learning applications, but has not been endeavoured for Ethiopic script. The Convolutional neural network model is evaluated for its performance using our database that contains 132,500 datasets of handwritten Amharic characters. Common handwritten recognition systems using machine learning use a combination of both feature extractors and classifiers. Currently the use of deep learning techniques shows promising improvements for machine learning based classification tasks. Our proposed CNN model gives an accuracy of 91.83% on training data and 90.47% on validation data.