LRTHR-Net: A Low-Resolution-to-High-Resolution Framework to Iteratively Refine the Segmentation of Thyroid Nodule in Ultrasound Images

Chen, Huai; Song, Shaoli; Wang, Xiuying; Wang, Renzhen; Meng, Deyu; Wang, Lisheng

The thyroid nodule is quickly increasing worldwide and the thyroid ultrasound is the key tool for the diagnosis of it. For the subtle difference between malignant and benign nodules, segmenting lesions is the crucial preliminary step for diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a low-resolution-to-high-resolution segmentation framework for TN-SCUI2020 challenge to alleviate the workload of clinicians and improve the efficiency of diagnosis. Specifically speaking, in order to integrate multi-scale information, several low-resolution segmenting results are obtained firstly and combined with a high-resolution image to refine them and obtain high-resolution results. Secondly, iterative-transfer is proposed to effectively initialize network based on previous trained one on small-scale images. Finally, ensemble refinement is introduced to utilize multiple models to refine the segmentation again. Experimental results showed the effectiveness of the proposed framework. And we won the 2nd place in the segmentation task of TN-SCUI2020.