Application Value of a Deep Convolutional Neural Network Model for Cytological Assessment of Thyroid Nodules

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the application value of a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) model for cytological assessment of thyroid nodules. METHODS: 117 patients with thyroid nodules who underwent thyroid cytology examination in the Affiliated People's Hospital of Ningbo University between January 2017 and December 2019 were included in this study. 100 papillary thyroid cancer samples and 100 nonmalignant samples were collected respectively. The sample images were translated vertically and horizontally. Thus, 900 images were separately created in the vertical and horizontal directions. The sample images were randomly divided into training samples (n = 1260) and test samples (n = 540) at the ratio of 7 : 3 per the training sample to test sample. According to the training samples, the pretrained deep convolutional neural network architecture Resnet50 was trained and fine-tuned. A convolutional neural network-based computer-aided detection (CNN-CAD) system was constructed to perform full-length scan of the test sample slices. The ability of CNN-CAD to screen malignant tumors was analyzed using the threshold setting method. Eighty pathological images were collected from patients who received treatment between January 2020 and May 2020 and used to verify the value of CNN in the screening of malignant thyroid nodules as verification set. RESULTS: With the number of iterations increasing, the training and verification loss of CNN model gradually decreased and tended to be stable, and the training and verification accuracy of CNN model gradually increased and tended to be stable. The average loss rate of training samples determined by the CNN model was (22.35 ± 0.62) %, and the average loss rate of test samples determined by the CNN model was (26.41 ± 3.37) %. The average accuracy rate of training samples determined by the CNN model was (91.04 ± 2.11) %, and the average accuracy rate of test samples determined by the CNN model was (91.26 ± 1.02)%. CONCLUSION: A CNN model exhibits a high value in the cytological diagnosis of thyroid diseases which can be used for the cytological diagnosis of malignant thyroid tumor in the clinic.