Hyperparameter Tuning of EfficientNet Method for Optimization of Malaria Detection System Based on Red Blood Cell Image

Nowadays, malaria has become an infectious disease with a high mortality rate. One way to detect malaria is through microscopic examination of blood preparations, which is done by experts and often takes a long time. With the development of deep learning technology, the observation of blood cell images infected with malaria can be more easily done. Therefore, this study proposes a red blood cell image-based malaria detection system using the EfficientNet method with hyperparameter tuning. There are three parameters which are learning rate, activation function, and optimiser. The learning rate used is 0.01 and 0.001, while the activation functions used are ReLU and Tanh. In addition, the optimisers used include Adam, SGD, and RMSProp. In the implementation, the cell image dataset from the NIH repository was pre-processed such as resizing, rotating, filtering, and data augmentation. Then the data is trained and tested on several EfficientNet models (B0, B1, B3, B5, and B7) and their performance values are compared. Based on the test results, EfficientNet-B5 and B7 models showed the best performance compared to other EfficientNet models. The most optimal system test results are when the EfficientNet B5 model is used with a learning rate of 0.001, ReLU activation function, and Adam optimiser, with values of 97.69% (accuracy), 98.36% (precision), and 97.03% (recall). This research has proven that proper model selection and hyperparameter tuning can maximise the performance of cell image-based malaria detection system. The development of this EfficientNet-based diagnostic method is more sensitive and specific in malaria detection using RBCs.