Dense Swin Transformer for Classification of Thyroid Nodules

As an early sign of thyroid cancer, thyroid nodules are the most common nodular lesions. As a non-invasive imaging method, ultrasound is widely used in the diagnosis of benign and malignant thyroid nodules. As there is no obvious difference in appearance between the two types of thyroid nodules, and the contrast with the surrounding muscle tissue is too low, it is difficult to distinguish the benign and malignant nodules. Therefore, a dense nodal Swin-Transformer(DST) method for the diagnosis of thyroid nodules is proposed in this paper. Image segmentation is carried out through patch, and feature maps of different sizes are constructed in four stages, which consider different information of each layer of features. In each stage block, a dense connection mechanism is used to make full use of multi-layer features and effectively improve the diagnostic performance. The experimental results of multi-center ultrasound data collected from 17 hospitals show that the accuracy of the proposed method is 87.27%, the sensitivity is 88.63%, and the specific effect is 85.16%, which verifies that the proposed algorithm has the potential to assist clinical practice.