Machine Learning Assisted Doppler Features for Enhancing Thyroid Cancer Diagnosis A Multi-Cohort Study
JOURNAL OF ULTRASOUND IN MEDICINE(2022)
Abstract
Background This pilot study aims at exploiting machine learning techniques to extract color Doppler ultrasound (CDUS) features and to build an artificial neural network (ANN) model based on these CDUS features for improving the diagnostic performance of thyroid cancer classification. Methods A total of 674 patients with 712 thyroid nodules (TNs) (512 from internal dataset and 200 from external dataset) were randomly selected in this retrospective study. We used ANN to build a model (TDUS-Net) for classifying malignant and benign TNs using both the automatically extracted quantitative CDUS features (whole ratio, intranodular ratio, peripheral ratio, and number of vessels) and gray-scale ultrasound (US) features defined by the American College of Radiology (ACR) Thyroid Imaging Reporting and Data System (TI-RADS). Then, we compared the diagnostic performance of the model, the performance of another ANN model based on the gray-scale US features alone (TUS-Net), and that of radiologists. Results The TDUS-Net (0.898, 95% CI: 0.868-0.922) achieved a higher area under the curve (AUC) than that of TUS-Net (0.881, 95% CI: 0.850-0.908) in the internal tests. Compared with radiologists, TDUS-Net (AUC: 0.925, 95% CI: 0.880-0.958) performed better than radiologists (AUC: 0.810, 95% CI: 0.749-0.862) in the external tests. Conclusions Applying a machine learning model by combining both gray-scale US features and CDUS features can achieve comparable or even higher performance than radiologists in classifying TNs.
MoreTranslated text
Key words
artificial neural network, Doppler ultrasound, machine learning, thyroid nodules, ultrasound
AI Read Science
Must-Reading Tree
Example
![](https://originalfileserver.aminer.cn/sys/aminer/pubs/mrt_preview.jpeg)
Generate MRT to find the research sequence of this paper
Chat Paper
Summary is being generated by the instructions you defined