School of Medical Imaging, Xuzhou Medical University, Xuzhou 221004, PR China; School of Biomedical Engineering, ShanghaiTech University, Shanghai 201210, PR China.
School of Information and Electrical Engineering, Xuzhou University of Technology, Xuzhou 221018, PR China.
Med Image Anal. 2023 Oct;89:102905. doi: 10.1016/j.media.2023.102905. Epub 2023 Jul 13.
Recently, accurate diagnosis of thyroid nodules has played a critical role in precision medicine and healthcare system management. Due to complicated changes in ultrasound features of texture, and similar visual appearance of benign-malignant nodules, the identification of cancerous thyroid lesions from a given ultrasound image still faces challenges for even experienced radiologists. Learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems have accordingly attracted more and more attention recently. However, little research is committed to developing a deep learning-based CAD system that has greater conformity with radiologists' diagnostic decision-making. In this study, we devise a texture and shape focused dual-stream attention neural network, dubbed TS-DSANN. Specifically, in the texture focused stream, we utilize the ImageNet pre-trained ResNet34 to guide the network to recognize texture-related nodule attributes. Meanwhile, in the shape focused stream, in addition to using ResNet34 backbone, jointly learning from scratch with the contour obtained by contour detection module to enhance the extraction of shape features. Afterward, we employ a concatenation operation to aggregate the abovementioned two stream networks for capturing richer and more representative features. Finally, we further utilize an online class activation mapping mechanism to assist the dual-stream network in generating a localization heatmap to obtain more visualization attention to the nodule from the whole image, and supervise classifier's attention in decision-making. Experimental results conducted on the two-center thyroid nodule ultrasound datasets verify that our proposed method has improved the classification performance, superior to the state-of-the-art methods.
最近,甲状腺结节的准确诊断在精准医学和医疗保健系统管理中起着至关重要的作用。由于纹理的超声特征变化复杂,以及良性和恶性结节的外观相似,即使是经验丰富的放射科医生,从给定的超声图像中识别癌症性甲状腺病变仍然具有挑战性。基于学习的计算机辅助诊断(CAD)系统因此最近引起了越来越多的关注。然而,很少有研究致力于开发与放射科医生的诊断决策更一致的基于深度学习的 CAD 系统。在本研究中,我们设计了一种专注于纹理和形状的双流注意力神经网络,称为 TS-DSANN。具体来说,在纹理关注流中,我们利用 ImageNet 预训练的 ResNet34 引导网络识别与纹理相关的结节属性。同时,在形状关注流中,除了使用 ResNet34 骨干网络外,我们还与轮廓检测模块获得的轮廓一起从头开始共同学习,以增强形状特征的提取。然后,我们采用拼接操作将上述两个流网络进行聚合,以捕获更丰富和更具代表性的特征。最后,我们进一步利用在线类激活映射机制来辅助双流网络生成定位热图,从而从整个图像中获得对结节的更多可视化关注,并在决策中监督分类器的关注。在两个中心甲状腺结节超声数据集上进行的实验结果验证了我们提出的方法提高了分类性能,优于最先进的方法。
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