Coarse to Fine Ensemble Network for Thyroid Nodule Segmentation

Tang, Zhe; Ma, Jianqiang

A thyroid nodule is defined as a small lump of tissue (either solid or cystic - filled with fluid), usually more than one-quarter of an inch in diameter, that may protrude from the neck’s surface or may form in the thyroid gland itself. The nodule can be either benign (non-cancerous) or malignant (cancerous). By the age of 45, up to half of the normal people have thyroid nodules that can be seen on an ultrasound. Fortunately, about 95% of thyroid nodules are benign. Recently, artificial intelligence becomes more and more popular in medical image processing. It helps the doctor in some scenarios; one is the thyroid nodule analysis in the ultrasound image. In this competition, we design a robust coarse to fine network that reaches a high-performance nodule segmentation result. Our method could handle some problematic cases, especially with no clear boundary of the thyroid nodule.