Ultrasound Image Classification of Thyroid Nodules Based on Attention Mechanism

Abstract

Ultrasound imaging of the thyroid gland is currently the most common diagnostic technique, used for pre diagnosis of benign and malignant thyroid nodules. During the clinical diagnosis, the condition judgment requires the high clinical experience of physicians. The low level of medical care in remote areas has led to an increased rate of misdiagnosis of benign and malignant nodules. To improve the accuracy of diagnosis and treatment effectiveness of doctors, this work proposes a benign and malignant thyroid classification model based on mechanisms of attention. First, this paper performs data cleaning on the collected data and performs pre-processing operations such as data enhancement to construct a new dataset. Then, a network model based on Lightweight Global Attention Module (LGAM) is constructed for the benign and malignant classification of nodules. Finally, it is shown by experimental analysis and comparison that the improved LGAM-based thyroid node classification model has achieved better experimental results on the dataset and can achieve the optimal classification accuracy of 95.16% for the network model proposed in this work.