Investigating White Blood Cells as a Source of False-Positive Malaria Parasite Detection in African Blood-Smear Images
White blood cells (WBCs) present on every Giemsa-stained thick blood smear share visual properties with early-stage Plasmodium falciparum ring-form trophozoites: small size, round morphology, and intense purple staining. They are a plausible but untested source of false positives in parasite-only detectors. We trained two YOLOv12s models on the Lacuna Malaria Detection dataset (8,000 images from Uganda and Ghana): Model A with parasite labels only, and Model B with both parasite and WBC labels. Seven independent spatial and statistical analyses tested whether false positive (FP) predictions cluster near WBC locations. All seven refute the hypothesis. In both models, 95% of FPs are pure ba...
| Authors | Samuel A. Adeniji, Goodness C. Obasi, Chris-Victor Ntwali et al. |
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| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 30 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 August 2026 |
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