Automatic Recognition and Classification System of Thyroid Nodules in CT Images Based on CNN

Abstract

Thyroid nodule lesions are one of the most common lesions of the thyroid; the incidence rate has been the highest in the past thirty years. X-ray computed tomography (CT) plays an increasingly important role in the diagnosis of thyroid diseases. Nonetheless, as a result of the artifact and high complexity of thyroid CT image, the traditional machine learning method cannot be applied to CT image processing. In this paper, an end-to-end thyroid nodule automatic recognition and classification system is designed based on CNN. An improved Eff-Unet segmentation network is used to segment thyroid nodules as ROI. The image processing algorithm optimizes the ROI region and divides the nodules. A low-level and high-level feature fusion classification network CNN-F is proposed to classify the benign and malignant nodules. After each module is connected in series with the algorithm, the automatic classification of each nodule can be realized. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed end-to-end thyroid nodule automatic recognition and classification system has excellent performance in diagnosing thyroid diseases. In the test set, the segmentation IOU reaches 0.855, and the classification output accuracy reaches 85.92%.