Skip to main content
Springer Nature Link
Log in

Automated detection and recognition of thyroid nodules in ultrasound images using Improve Cascade Mask R-CNN

  • 1176: Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning for Biomedical Applications
  • Published:
Multimedia Tools and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Accurate diagnosis of thyroid nodules using ultrasonography heavily relies on the superb skills and rich experience of senior radiologists, considering the low contrast, high noise of the ultrasound image, and the diverse appearance of the nodules. Computer-aided diagnosis systems could diagnose thyroid nodules based on ultrasound characteristics to assist radiologists. However, the existing learning-based approaches for detecting and recognizing thyroid nodules have the problems of inaccurate localization and low recognition accuracy. In this study, we propose an Improved Cascade Mask R-CNN for effectively detecting and recognizing thyroid nodules. Firstly, a more effective detector is designed to better classify the ROIs and better correct the bounding boxes. Secondly, a more effective balanced L1 loss function is used to increase the gradient of the easy sample and solve the problem of imbalance between hard samples and easy samples during training. Finally, a more effective soft non-maximum suppression (Soft-NMS) method is used to set an attenuation function for adjacent bounding boxes, which solves the problem of possible missing detection in non-maximum suppression (NMS). The improved model is trained and verified by using real 1408 images collected from the known hospital. Under the localization accuracy of the IoU threshold of 0.5, the mAP reaches 87.1%, and the recognition accuracy reaches 98.67%. The experiment results show that the improved model is effective and highly valuable to help the doctors for the recognition of benign and malignant thyroid nodules.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Bibicu D, Moraru L, Biswas A (2013) Thyroid nodule recognition based on feature selection and pixel classification methods. J Digit Imaging 26(1):119–128

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Bodla N, Singh B, Chellappa R, Davis LS (2017) Soft-NMS–improving object detection with one line of code. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. pp. 5561–5569

  3. Cai Z, Vasconcelos N (2018) Cascade r-cnn: delving into high quality object detection. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. pp. 6154–6162

  4. Cai Z, Vasconcelos N (2019) Cascade R-CNN: high quality object detection and instance segmentation. arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.09756

  5. Chang CY, Chen SJ, Tsai MF (2010) Application of support-vector-machine-based method for feature selection and classification of thyroid nodules in ultrasound images. Pattern Recogn 43(10):3494–3506

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Chi J, Yu X, Zhang Y (2018) Thyroid nodule malignant risk detection in ultrasound image by fusing deep and texture features. Journal of Image and Graphics 23(10):1582–1593

    Google Scholar 

  7. Deng J, Dong W, Socher R, Li LJ, Li K, Fei-Fei L (2009) Imagenet: a large-scale hierarchical image database. In proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. pp. 248-255

  8. Ding J, Cheng H, Ning C, Huang J, Zhang Y (2011) Quantitative measurement for thyroid cancer characterization based on elastography. J Ultras Med 30(9):1259–1266

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Girshick R, Donahue J, Darrell T, Malik J (2014) Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. pp. 580–587

  10. He K, Zhang X, Ren S, Sun J (2016) Deep residual learning for image recognition. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. pp. 770–778

  11. He K, Gkioxari G, Dollár P, Girshick R (2017) Mask r-cnn. In: Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision. pp. 2961–2969

  12. Ke W (2018) An ultrasonic image recognition method for papillary thyroid carcinoma based on depth convolution neural network. Dissertation, Guangdong University of Technology

  13. Keramidas EG, Maroulis D, Iakovidis DK (2012) TND: a thyroid nodule detection system for analysis of ultrasound images and videos. J Med Syst 36(3):1271–1281

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Lin TY, Dollár P, Girshick R, He K, Hariharan B, Belongie S (2017) Feature pyramid networks for object detection. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. pp. 2117–2125

  15. Liu W, Anguelov D, Erhan D, Szegedy C, Reed S, Fu CY, Berg AC (2016) SSD: single shot multibox detector. In: European conference on computer vision. pp. 21–37

  16. Liu Y, Guo Y, GeorgIoU T, Lew MS (2018) Fusion that matters: convolutional fusion networks for visual recognition. Multimed Tools Appl 77(22):29407–29434

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Liu X, Ma X, Liu L (2019) Thyroid nodule detection method based on median filter and residual network. Computer Engineering and Applications 55(13):254–259

    Google Scholar 

  18. Liu T, Guo Q, Lian C, Ren X, Liang S, Yu J, Niu L, Sun W, Shen D (2019) Automated detection and classification of thyroid nodules in ultrasound images using clinical-knowledge-guided convolutional neural networks. Med Image Anal 58:101555

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Ma J, Wu F, Jiang T, Zhu J, Kong D (2017) Cascade convolutional neural networks for automatic detection of thyroid nodules in ultrasound images. Med Phys 44(5):1678–1691

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Ma J, Wu F, Zhu J, Xu D, Kong D (2017) A pre-trained convolutional neural network based method for thyroid nodule diagnosis. Ultrasonics 73:221–230

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Neubeck A, Van Gool L (2006) Efficient non-maximum suppression. In: 18th international conference on pattern recognition. pp. 850-855

  22. Pang J, Chen K, Shi J, Feng H, Ouyang W, Lin D (2019) Libra r-cnn: towards balanced learning for object detection. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. pp. 821–830

  23. Peng W (2017) The study of thyroid nodule recognition based on CT images. Dissertation, Zhejiang University

  24. Redmon J, Farhadi A (2017) YOLO9000: better, faster, stronger. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. pp. 7263–7271

  25. Redmon J, Divvala S, Girshick R, Farhadi A (2016) You only look once: unified, real-time object detection. In: Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition. pp. 770–778

  26. Ren S, He K, Girshick R, Sun J (2017) Faster R-CNN: towards real-time object detection with region proposal networks. In: Advances in neural information processing systems. pp. 91–99

  27. Simonyan K, Zisserman A (2014) Very deep convolutional networks for large-scale image recognition arXiv preprint arXiv: 1409.1556

  28. Sipos JA (2009) Advances in ultrasound for the diagnosis and management of thyroid cancer. Thyroid 19(12):1363–1372

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Tsantis S, Dimitropoulos N, Cavouras D, Nikiforidis G (2009) Morphological and wavelet features towards sonographic thyroid nodules evaluation. Comput Med Imag Grap 33(2):91–99

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Uijlings JR, Van De Sande KE, Gevers T, Smeulders AW (2013) Selective search for object recognition. Int J Comput Vis 104(2):154–171

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Wu Y, Chen Y, Yuan L, Liu Z, Wang L, Li H, Fu Y (2019) Double-head rcnn: rethinking classification and localization for object detection. arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.06493

  32. Zhu C, Zheng T, Kilfoy BA, Han X, Ma S, Ba Y, Bai Y, Wang R, Zhu Y, Zhang Y (2009) A birth cohort analysis of the incidence of papillary thyroid cancer in the United States, 1973-2004. Thyroid 19(10):1061–1066

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Funding

This work was supported by the Key R&D Program of JiangXi Province of China (Grant No.20181BBG70031).

Author information

Author notes

  1. Yinghao Zheng and Lina Qin contributed equally to the research in this paper.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information Engineering, Nanchang University, Nanchang City, Jiangxi Province, China

    Yinghao Zheng, Lina Qin, Taorong Qiu & Zhixin Xue

  2. Department of Ultrasond, the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University, Nanchang City, Jiangxi Province, China

    Aiyun Zhou & Pan Xu

Authors
  1. Yinghao Zheng
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Lina Qin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Taorong Qiu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Aiyun Zhou
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Pan Xu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Zhixin Xue
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Taorong Qiu.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Ethical approval

The ethics committee of the First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University approved our study. We retrospectively analyzed these data.

Informed consent

This articles does not contain patient data.

Additional information

Publisher’s note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Zheng, Y., Qin, L., Qiu, T. et al. Automated detection and recognition of thyroid nodules in ultrasound images using Improve Cascade Mask R-CNN. Multimed Tools Appl 81, 13253–13273 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-021-10939-4

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-021-10939-4

Keywords

Search

Navigation