Data from: Automatic patient-level recognition of four Plasmodium species on thin blood smear by a Real Time Detector Transformer (RT-DETR) object detection algorithm: a proof-of-concept and evaluation

Automatic patient-level recognition of four Plasmodium species on thin blood smear by a Real Time Dectector Transformer (RT-DETR) object detection algorithm: a proof-of-concept and evaluation Emilie Guemas, Baptiste Routier, Théo Ghelfenstein-Ferreira, Camille Cordier, Sophie Hartuis, Bénédicte Marion, Sébastien Bertout, Emmanuelle Varlet-Marie, Damien Costa, Grégoire Pasquier Abstract: Malaria remains a global health problem with 247 million cases and 619,000 deaths in 2021. Diagnostic of Plasmodium species is important for administering the appropriate treatment. The gold-standard diagnosis from accurate species identification remains the thin blood smear. Nevertheless, this method is time-consuming and requires highly skilled and trained microscopists. To overcome these issues, new diagnostic tools based on deep learning are emerging. This study aimed to evaluate the performances of a RT-DETR (Real-Time Detection Transformer)object detection algorithm to discriminate Plasmodium species on thin blood smears images. The algorithm was trained and validated on a dataset consisting in 24,720 images from 475 thin blood smears corresponding to 2,002,597 labels. Performances were calculated with a test dataset of 4,508 images from 170 smears corresponding to 358,825labels coming from six French university hospital. At the patient level, the RT-DETR algorithm exhibited an overall accuracy of 79.4% (135/170) with a recall of 74% (40/54) and 81.9% (95/116) for negative and positive smears, respectively. Among Plasmodium positive smears, the global sensitivity was 82.7% (91/110) with a sensitivity of 90% (38/42), 81.8% (18/22) and 76.1% (35/46) for P. falciparum, P. malariae and P. ovale/vivax, respectively. The YOLOv5 model achieved a World Health Organization (WHO) competence level 2 for species identification. Besides, the RT-DETR algorithm may be run in real-time on low-cost devices such as a smartphone and could be suitable for deployment in low-resource setting areas where microscopy experts are lacking. Data collection: The training and validation dataset included 24,720 pictures taken from 475 manually May Grunwald-Giemsa (MGG)-stained thin blood smears from the Montpellier University Hospital collection and for a smaller part from the Toulouse University Hospital collection. In Montpellier, the pictures were taken with a Flexcam C1 microscope camera (Leica) attached to a Leica DM 2000 microscope and Leica DF450C microscope camera adapted with a Leica DM250