# On-Device Multi-Species Malaria Detection with Uncertainty-Calibrated Slide-Level Aggregation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.08566 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08566/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 1 of its 21 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 9 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Malaria remains a leading cause of mortality in resource-limited settings, where expert microscopists are scarce. Automated diagnosis based on microscopy images thus has strong potential to improve care delivery. But for an algorithm to deploy, a necessary requirement is that it meet a suite of non-obvious (from a machine learning (ML) perspective) clinical constraints. Therefore, in close consultation with a national health center we developed a malaria diagnosis pipeline which addresses key requirements listed by the health care center but typically ignored in the ML malaria literature. In particular, it includes: (i) stopping criteria (to reduce image acquisition and time-to-result); (ii) human-in-the-loop functionality (for review and accountability); (iii) multi-species discrimination (since treatment varies by species); (iv) thick film detection (standard for microscopy); (v) computationally-efficient uncertainty calculations (to aid clinician review); and (vi) an edge device platform (since internet can be spotty in this catchment area). The mobile system performs all inference on-device using YOLOv13n deployed via TensorFlow Lite. It detects four species and white blood cells from Giemsa-stained thick blood smear images, aggregating per-image detections into slide-level parasitemia with World Health Organization (WHO)-standard quantification. This paper highlights these various clinical constraints and offers methods to address them. Evaluated on 2,739 annotated images across all four species, the system achieves mAP@0.5 of 0.863, per-image parasite count correlation of r = 0.812, slide-level r = 0.951 (soft counting, 10 images/slide), and runs entirely offline with a pipeline time of 10.27 +- 1.65 s per image.