Automatic Thyroid Ultrasound Image Classification Using Feature Fusion Network

Abstract

Nowadays, diagnosis of thyroid nodules is mainly based on clinical methods, which requires a lot of manpower and medical resources. Therefore, this work proposes an automated thyroid ultrasound nodule diagnosis method that combines convolutional neural networks and image texture features. The main steps include: Firstly, ultrasound thyroid nodule dataset is established by collecting positive and negative samples, standardizing of images and segmentation of nodule area. Secondly, through texture features extraction, feature selection and data dimensionality reduction, texture features model is obtained; Thirdly, by transfer learning, deep neural network is used to obtain feature model of the nodule in images; Then, texture features model and convolutional neural network feature model are combined to form a new nodule feature model called Feature Fusion Network; Finally, Feature Fusion Network is applied to train and improve performance than single network, and a deep neural network diagnosis model that can adapt to the characteristics of thyroid nodules is built. In order to test this method, 1874 groups of clinical ultrasound thyroid nodules are collected. Harmonic average F-score based on Precision and Recall is used as an evaluation indicator. Experimental results show that Feature Fusion Network can distinguish between benign and malignant thyroid nodules with an F-score of 92.52%. Compared with traditional machine learning methods and convolutional neural networks, performance of this work is better.

Keywords

• Ultrasound image
• diagnosis of thyroid nodules
• texture features
• convolutional neural network
• feature fusion