A review on ultrasound-based thyroid cancer tissue characterization and automated classification.

In this paper, we review the different studies that developed Computer Aided Diagnostic (CAD) for automated classification of thyroid cancer into benign and malignant types. Specifically, we discuss the different types of features that are used to study and analyze the differences between benign and malignant thyroid nodules. These features can be broadly categorized into (a) the sonographic features from the ultrasound images, and (b) the non-clinical features extracted from the ultrasound images using statistical and data mining techniques. We also present a brief description of the commonly used classifiers in ultrasound based CAD systems. We then review the studies that used features based on the ultrasound images for thyroid nodule classification and highlight the limitations of such studies. We also discuss and review the techniques used in studies that used the non-clinical features for thyroid nodule classification and report the classification accuracies obtained in these studies.

Cost-effective and non-invasive automated benign and malignant thyroid lesion classification in 3D contrast-enhanced ultrasound using combination of wavelets and textures: a class of ThyroScan™ algorithms.

Ultrasound has great potential to aid in the differential diagnosis of malignant and benign thyroid lesions, but interpretative pitfalls exist and the accuracy is still poor. To overcome these difficulties, we developed and analyzed a range of knowledge representation techniques, which are a class of ThyroScan™ algorithms from Global Biomedical Technologies Inc., California, USA, for automatic classification of benign and malignant thyroid lesions. The analysis is based on data obtained from twenty nodules (ten benign and ten malignant) taken from 3D contrast-enhanced ultrasound images. Fine needle aspiration biopsy and histology confirmed malignancy. Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and texture algorithms are used to extract relevant features from the thyroid images. The resulting feature vectors are fed to three different classifiers: K-Nearest Neighbor (K-NN), Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN), and Decision Tree (DeTr). The performance of these classifiers is compared using Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves. Our results show that combination of DWT and texture features coupled with K-NN resulted in good performance measures with the area of under the ROC curve of 0.987, a classification accuracy of 98.9%, a sensitivity of 98%, and a specificity of 99.8%. Finally, we have proposed a novel integrated index called Thyroid Malignancy Index (TMI), which is made up of texture features, to diagnose benign or malignant nodules using just one index. We hope that this TMI will help clinicians in a more objective detection of benign and malignant thyroid lesions.