Thyroid Nodule Classification in Ultrasound Images by Fine-Tuning Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Recent research in Saskatchewan

 

With many thyroid nodules being incidentally detected, it is important to identify as many malignant nodules as possible while excluding those that are highly likely to be benign from fine needle aspiration (FNA) biopsies or surgeries. This paper presents a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for classifying thyroid nodules in ultrasound images. We use deep learning approach to extract features from thyroid ultrasound images. Ultrasound images are pre-processed to calibrate their scale and remove the artifacts. A pre-trained GoogLeNet model is then fine-tuned using the pre-processed image samples which leads to superior feature extraction. The extracted features of the thyroid ultrasound images are sent to a Cost-sensitive Random Forest classifier to classify the images into “malignant” and “benign” cases. The experimental results show the proposed fine-tuned GoogLeNet model achieves excellent classification performance, attaining 98.29% classification accuracy, 99.10% sensitivity and 93.90% specificity for the images in an open access database (Pedraza et al. 16), while 96.34% classification accuracy, 86% sensitivity and 99% specificity for the images in our local health region database.

Authors:
Jianning Chi, Ekta Walia, Paul Babyn, Jimmy Wang, Gary Groot, and Mark Eramian
Journal of Digital Imaging. 2017 Aug; 30(4): 477–486.
Published online 2017 Jul 10. doi:  10.1007/s10278-017-9997-y

Help us to Help Others

Awareness/Education

  • Community publicity & advocacy
  • Educational webinars
  • Information resources on our website

Patient Support

  • Toll Free Help line and email
  • Website thyroid news
  • Thyrobulletin newsletter

Research

  • Annual Thyroid Research grants
  • Thyroid research news
  • Thyroid research articles