Discriminating the Nature of Thyroid Nodules Using the Hybrid Method

Prompt and correct diagnosis of benign and malignant thyroid nodules has always been a core issue in the clinical practice of thyroid nodules. Ultrasound imaging is one of the most common visualizing tools used by radiologists to identify the nature of thyroid nodules. However, visual assessment of nodules is difficult and often affected by inter- and intraobserver variabilities. This paper proposes a novel hybrid approach based on machine learning and information fusion to discriminate the nature of thyroid nodules. Statistical features are extracted from the B-mode ultrasound image while deep features are extracted from the shear-wave elastography image. Classifiers including logistic regression, Naive Bayes, and support vector machine are adopted to train classification models with statistical features and deep features, respectively, for comparison. A voting system with certain criteria is used to combine two classification results to obtain a better performance. Experimental and comparison results demonstrate that the proposed method classifies the thyroid nodules correctly and efficiently.