Malaria has been recognised as a disease for thousands of years. Descriptions of the disease date from as far back as 1700 BC in China, and 1570 BC in Egypt. The association between malaria and marshes (where mosquitoes breed) has also been long recognised. In fact, the name 'malaria' (from 'bad air' in the marshes) is based on this association. Malaria is an infection of red blood cells caused by a single-celled parasite. Malaria is almost always spread by the bite of an infected female Anopheles mosquito, but also potentially by a transfusion with contaminated blood, or an injection with a needle that was previously used by a person with the infection. Malaria occurs most commonly in tropical areas of the world, such as Africa, Asia, and Central and South America.
Malaria parasitemia is a measurement of the amount of Malaria parasites in the patient's blood and an indicator for the degree of infection. Differential white blood cell (WBC) counts are basic and essential indicators in any type of illness resulting from infection. In malaria, WBC counts are generally characterized as low to normal during treatment. WBC-counts data, before and during treatment with artemisinin derivatives, was gathered for patients with either Plasmodium falciparum or Plasmodium vivax infection. This paper proposed a method for segmentation of WBC components for malaria detection.
