TSE-GAN: strain elastography using generative adversarial network for thyroid disease diagnosis

Over the past 35 years, studies conducted worldwide have revealed a threefold increase in the incidence of thyroid cancer. Strain elastography is a new imaging technique to identify benign and malignant thyroid nodules due to its sensitivity to tissue stiffness. However, there are certain limitations of this technique, particularly in terms of standardization of the compression process, evaluation of results and several assumptions used in commercial strain elastography modes for the purpose of simplifying imaging analysis. In this work, we propose a novel conditional generative adversarial network (TSE-GAN) for automatically generating thyroid strain elastograms, which adopts a global-to-local architecture to improve the ability of extracting multi-scale features and develops an adaptive deformable U-net structure in the sub-generator to apply effective deformation. Furthermore, we introduce a Lab-based loss function to induce the networks to generate realistic thyroid elastograms that conform to the probability distribution of the target domain. Qualitative and quantitative assessments are conducted on a clinical dataset provided by Shanghai Sixth People's Hospital. Experimental results demonstrate that thyroid elastograms generated by the proposed TSE-GAN outperform state-of-the-art image translation methods in meeting the needs of clinical diagnostic applications and providing practical value.