Hybrid kernel support vector machine with cuckoo search optimization for malaria detection from blood smear images

Abstract

Microscopic image-based malaria detection still struggles to capture complex features due to variations in lighting and color. The support vector machine (SVM) method is often used in medical image detection, but its performance depends heavily on the selection of optimal kernel and hyperparameters (C and gamma). Conventional approaches, with single kernels and manual tuning, have limitations in capturing both spatial information and color distribution simultaneously. Therefore, this research proposes hybrid kernel support vector machine-cuckoo search algorithm (HKSVM-CSA) method that combines the radial basis function (RBF) kernel and histogram intersection for SVM, along with hyperparameter optimization using the CSA. The dataset used is malaria cell images, which contains parasitized and uninfected images of blood cells. The proposed method comprises five main steps: dataset preparation, feature extraction, HKSVM, hyperparameter optimization, and model evaluation. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed model achieves 94% accuracy, 93% sensitivity, 94% specificity, and area under the curve (AUC) of 0.98, which is significantly better than standard SVM, SVM-genetic algorithm (GA), and k-nearest neighbors (KNN). These results show that combining kernel and CSA significantly improves detection accuracy. This approach is promising for image-based automatic systems for infectious disease diagnosis.