Title
Multi-task Cascade Convolution Neural Networks for Automatic Thyroid Nodule Detection and Recognition.
Abstract
Thyroid ultrasonography is 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. In today's clinical practice, senior doctors could pinpoint nodules by analyzing global context features, local geometry structure, and intensity changes, which would require rich clinical experience accumulated from hundreds and thousands of nodule case studies. To alleviate doctors' tremendous labor in the diagnosis procedure, we advocate a machine learning approach to the detection and recognition tasks in this paper. In particular, we develop a multi-task cascade convolution neural network framework (MC-CNN) to exploit the context information of thyroid nodules. It may be noted that, our framework is built upon a large number of clinically-confirmed thyroid ultrasound images with accurate and detailed ground truth labels. Other key advantages of our framework result from a multi-task cascade architecture, two stages of carefully-designed deep convolution networks in order to detect and recognize thyroid nodules in a pyramidal fashion, and capturing various intrinsic features in a global-to-local way. Within our framework, the potential regions of interest after initial detection are further fed to the spatial pyramid augmented CNNs to embed multi-scale discriminative information for fine-grained thyroid recognition. Experimental results on clinical ultrasound images have indicated that, our MC-CNN is accurate and effective for both thyroid nodules detection and recognition. For the correct diagnosis rate of malignant and benign thyroid nodules, its mAP performance can achieve up to 98.2% accuracy, which outperforms the common CNNs by % on average. In addition, we conduct rigorous user studies to confirm that our MC-CNN outperforms experienced doctors, yet only consuming roughly 2% (1/48) of doctors' examination time on average. Therefore, the accuracy and efficiency of our new method exhibit its great potential in clinical applications.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/JBHI.2018.2852718
IEEE journal of biomedical and health informatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
Feature extraction,Cancer,Ultrasonic imaging,Image recognition,Convolution,Shape,Predictive models
Computer vision,Pattern recognition,Convolutional neural network,Convolution,Computer science,Thyroid,Feature extraction,Ground truth,Artificial intelligence,Artificial neural network,Thyroid nodules,Discriminative model
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
23
3
2168-2208
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.39
0
Authors
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Wenfeng Song195.22
Shuai Li217531.37
Ji Liu3155.59
Hong Qin42120184.31
Bo Zhang59547.19
Shuyang Zhang6131.97
Aimin Hao718340.57