Computer-AIded Diagnosis for Thyroid Graves' Disease in Ultrasound Images

Hyperthyroidism is a common thyroid disease. Graves' disease is one of the most common etiologies with 70–80% of hyperthyroidism. In clinical diagnosis, physicians generally utilize ultrasound (US) images for inspections. Unfortunately, they are not able to decide the Graves' disease directly on the US images, and have to rely on blood tests to assure it. The blood tests often take weeks to obtain the inspection results. Hence, in this article, we proposed an approach to diagnose Graves' disease on US image directly. The automatic diagnosis meets a short-time inspection, and patients may know their situation quickly. We segment the thyroid regions and utilize a high-performance classifier (support vector machine — SVM) to classify the regions. The Graves' disease is diagnosed using an area measure on the classified regions. Experimental results show effectiveness of the proposed approach.