Computer-aided diagnosis system for classifying benign and malignant thyroid nodules in multi-stained FNAB cytological images

An automated computer-aided diagnosis system is developed to classify benign and malignant thyroid nodules using multi-stained fine needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) cytological images. In the first phase, the image segmentation is performed to remove the background staining information and retain the appropriate foreground cell objects in cytological images using mathematical morphology and watershed transform segmentation methods. Subsequently, statistical features are extracted using two-level discrete wavelet transform (DWT) decomposition, gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) and Gabor filter based methods. The classifiers k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), Elman neural network (ENN) and support vector machine (SVM) are tested for classifying benign and malignant thyroid nodules. The combination of watershed segmentation, GLCM features and k-NN classifier results a lowest diagnostic accuracy of 60 %. The highest diagnostic accuracy of 93.33 % is achieved by ENN classifier trained with the statistical features extracted by Gabor filter bank from the images segmented by morphology and watershed transform segmentation methods. It is also observed that SVM classifier results its highest diagnostic accuracy of 90 % for DWT and Gabor filter based features along with morphology and watershed transform segmentation methods. The experimental results suggest that the developed system with multi-stained thyroid FNAB images would be useful for identifying thyroid cancer irrespective of staining protocol used.