Tnc-Net: Automatic Classification for Thyroid Nodules Lesions Using Convolutional Neural Network

Abstract

Automatic and accurate classification of thyroid nodules is of great significance to doctors for clinical diagnosis and subsequent treatment recommendations. Since there are no obvious features between benign and malignant nodules, enlarging or reducing the image will result in blurred edges and image distortion, thus limiting the accuracy of clinical diagnosis. Furthermore, the prevalence of sample class imbalance in medical images poses significant challenges to applying convolutional neural networks in thyroid nodule classification methods. This paper proposes a network Tnc-Net for thyroid nodule classification. The network backbone can adapt to the problem of small data volume, capture global features with the help of simple channel attention, and effectively extract image information. The branch network supplements the feature extraction from the backbone network, and the information extracted from the backbone and branch networks is effectively utilized through the fusion module. In addition, this article designs training strategies suitable for this network to deal with category imbalance, improve model classification performance, and make classification results more clinically referenceable. The method test accuracy is 0.902, which exceeds other classic deep learning models in classification. This result demonstrates the effectiveness of our method in achieving automatic classification of thyroid nodules.

Keywords

• Thyroid nodule
• data imbalance
• convolutional neural network
• classification
• attention mechanism