Malaria still killed nearly 600,000 people in 2023 with 94% of them in Africa. For 140 years, diagnosis has meant a stained slide, a trained eye, and 20 to 60 minutes per patient. In some areas in rural Africa, that expert often isn’t there.
A new scoping review in npj Digital Medicine maps what happens when AI steps in.
The headline numbers are striking:
Convolutional Neural Networks, CNNs now hit 97–98% accuracy on curated blood-smear images
AI platforms scan 200,000 red cells in 7–10 minutes which is 100× what a human reviews








