Perfect separation may be difficult to achieve because 1) there is a range of red blood cell sizes in the blood (noise in background), and 2) there is a wide range in the shape and morphology of infected red blood cells depending on the stage of parasite development (ring, trophozoite, schizont).  

That being said, later stage parasitized cells (trophs and schizonts) tend to be more rigid than uninfected cells, so DLD could work.  

Check out the work from Jonas Tegenfeldt's group (attached) which includes a different parasite, T. cyclops (not intra-erythrocytic so a bit different). 

I'm not aware of anyone using DLD with malaria infected RBCs but there has been other work on sorting infected RBCs using physical properties that could be of use designing a system for DLD.

See work from Subra Suresh's group such as the one attached.

And the attached work on cell marignation in malaria. 

Article Deformability based cell margination—A simple microfluidic d...

Article A microfabricated deformability-based flow cytometer with ap...

Article Morphology-based sorting-blood cells and parasites

Hi,

sickled or malaria infected RBCs are usually more stiffer than healthy cells. There is a paper for DLD based separation of RBCs (healthy & sickled).

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.1877v1.pdf

Hope that helps you

Hello,

You could take a look at this recent review article to get an overview of available methods for cell separation (DLD is a very specific method).

Best wishes,

Timm

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000186861400102X