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Investigating White Blood Cells as a Source of False-Positive Malaria Parasite Detection in African Blood-Smear Images

arXiv · AI, language, vision and robotics · article · Aug 30, 2026 · UTC

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 cl

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