Hybrid deep learning assisted multi classification: Grading of malignant thyroid nodules

Abstract

Thyroid nodules are commonly diagnosed with ultrasonography, which includes internal characteristics, varying looks, and hazy boundaries, making it challenging for a clinician to differentiate between malignant and benign forms based only on visual identification. The advancement of AI, particularly DL, provides significant breakthroughs in the domain of medical image identification. Yet, there are certain obstacles to achieving accuracy as well as efficacy in thyroid nodule detection. The thyroid nodules in this study are detected and classified using an inventive hybrid deep learning‐assisted multi‐classification method. The median blur method is applied in this work to eliminate the salt and pepper noise from the image. Then MPIU‐Net‐based segmentation is utilized to segment the image. The LGBPNP‐based features are retrieved from the segmented image to obtain a single histogram sequence of the LGBP pattern in addition to other features like extraction of multi‐texton and LTP‐based features. After the feature extraction, the data augmentation process is applied and then the features are fed to the hybrid classification‐based nodule classification model that comprises Deep Maxout and CNN, this hybrid classification trains the features and predicts the thyroid nodule. Additionally, the TIRADS score classification is used for the projected malignant thyroid nodule coupled with statistical features collected from the segmented. The DBNAAF with transfer learning model is employed to classify the grading of malignant thyroid nodules, where the weights of the model are learned with transfer learning. The MCC of the Hybrid Model is 0.9445, whereas the DCNN is 0.6858, YOLOV3‐DMRF is 0.7229, CNN is 0.7780, DBN is 0.7601, Bi‐GRU is 0.7038, Deep Maxout is 0.7528, and RNN is 0.8522, respectively.