Friday 12th July 2024 in the Video conference of the ACEIoT, Staff and students from the African Centre of Excellence in Internet of Things have discussed the findings from a research dubbed, “Vision Transformers for Efficient Malaria Diagnosis, Treatment, and Management in Africa: A Focus on Plasmodium Falciparum.

The research seminar was facilitated by Prof. Oluwatoyin A. Enikuomehin, PhD FBCS Professor of Computer Science & Director Directorate of ICT, Lagos State University, Nigeria who conducted this research and currently visiting Rwanda and the University of Rwanda.

The research was conducted in different African countries and focused on malaria. “Given that Malaria remains a significant public health burden in Africa, with Plasmodium Falciparum being the most deadly species causing significant change in the blood cells which are observable via critical analysis of Microscopic images, efficient diagnosis and timely treatment are crucial for control and effective management. Thus, the rationale of this research”, said Prof. Oluwatoyin A. Enikuomehin .

This study harnessed the power of Vision Transformers (ViT) to develop a novel framework for malaria diagnosis, treatment, and management, with a specific focus on Plasmodium Falciparum, leveraging a large dataset of microscopy images from African patients.

The research approach was to utilize Vision Transformers (ViT) for global context awareness and feature fusion leaving out the conventional use of convolutional neural networks (CNNs).

“We obtained the Africa-focused dataset from Global Disease of Burden comprising of 2,500 microscopy images of blood smears from patients across 5 African countries: Nigeria (600 images), South Africa (500 images), Ghana (400 images), Kenya (300 images), Uganda (250 images). Expert annotations for Plasmodium Falciparum parasite detection, segmentation, and classification were used for validation”, he noted.

After presentation of the findings, participants discussed the approaches, methods used and the validity and credibility of the research findings.

It was a very interesting and interactive seminar with a lot of questions and contributions from audience to the presented topics.

The seminar was delivered as a joint hybrid weekly seminar that usually gathers the ACEIoT Students, academic staff and researchers from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, in Ghana.
Prof. Oluwatoyin A expressed his interest for his University to join this weekly seminar as a way of sharing knowledge, findings/results from research conducted at both universities.

Prof Oluwatoyin was accompanied by Mr Said, Chief Finance Officer of the University.