Ultrasound Image-Based Diagnosis of Malignant Thyroid Nodule Using Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Computer-aided diagnosis systems have been developed to assist doctors in diagnosing thyroid nodules to reduce errors made by traditional diagnosis methods, which are mainly based on the experiences of doctors. Therefore, the performance of such systems plays an important role in enhancing the quality of a diagnosing task. Although there have been the state-of-the art studies regarding this problem, which are based on handcrafted features, deep features, or the combination of the two, their performances are still limited. To overcome these problems, we propose an ultrasound image-based diagnosis of the malignant thyroid nodule method using artificial intelligence based on the analysis in both spatial and frequency domains. Additionally, we propose the use of weighted binary cross-entropy loss function for the training of deep convolutional neural networks to reduce the effects of unbalanced training samples of the target classes in the training data. Through our experiments with a popular open dataset, namely the thyroid digital image database (TDID), we confirm the superiority of our method compared to the state-of-the-art methods.