Improvised convolutional auto encoder for thyroid nodule image enhancement and segmentation

Abstract

Thyroid ultrasonography and thermography are a widely used clinical technique for nodule diagnosis in thyroid regions. However, it remains difficult to detect and recognize the nodules due to low contrast, high noise, and diverse appearance of nodules. To alleviate doctors' tremendous labor in the diagnosis procedure, we advocate a machine learning approach to the detection and recognition tasks in this paper. Moreover, this research mainly focuses on segmenting the image and finding the probable region. In this research work an improvised convolutional auto encoder (ICAE) is introduced for segmenting the image and finding the probable region of thyroid gland and it enhances image. ICAE comprises various layer and mechanism, each having their own task. Apart from the traditional approach, skip connection is applied for the image enhancement and dual frame is introduced for better feature extraction. Further optimization technique is used for increasing the learning rate. ICAE is evaluated considering digital database thyroid image (DDTI) dataset with performance metrics like accuracy, true positive rate, false positive rate, dice coefficient and similarity index (SI); also, comparative analysis is carried out with various existing model and proposed model simply outperforms the existing model.