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. 2019 Oct 31:2019:6328329.
doi: 10.1155/2019/6328329. eCollection 2019.

Diagnostic Value of Machine Learning-Based Quantitative Texture Analysis in Differentiating Benign and Malignant Thyroid Nodules

Bulent Colakoglu  1 , Deniz Alis  2 , Mert Yergin  3
Affiliations

Diagnostic Value of Machine Learning-Based Quantitative Texture Analysis in Differentiating Benign and Malignant Thyroid Nodules

Bulent Colakoglu et al. J Oncol. .

Abstract

Aim: The aim of this study is to evaluate the diagnostic value of machine learning- (ML-) based quantitative texture analysis in the differentiation of benign and malignant thyroid nodules.

Materials and methods: A sum of 306 quantitative textural features of 235 thyroid nodules (102 malignant, 43.4%; 133 benign, 56.4%) of a total of 198 patients were investigated using the random forest ML classifier. Feature selection and dimension reduction were conducted using reproducibility testing and a wrapper method. The diagnostic accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, and area under curve (AUC) of the proposed method were compared with the histopathological or cytopathological findings as reference methods.

Results: Of the 306 initial texture features, 284 (92.2%) showed good reproducibility (intraclass correlation ≥0.80). The random forest classifier accurately identified 87 out of 102 malignant thyroid nodules and 117 out of 133 benign thyroid nodules, which is a diagnostic sensitivity of 85.2%, specificity of 87.9%, and accuracy of 86.8%. The AUC of the model was 0.92.

Conclusions: Quantitative textural analysis of thyroid nodules using ML classification can accurately discriminate benign and malignant thyroid nodules. Our findings should be validated by multicenter prospective studies using completely independent external data.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
The scheme summarized the main workflow of the current study.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Evaluation of the model's performance by 10-fold cross-validation. 10-fold cross-validation first randomly divides all the data into ten parts then holds out 10% of the data for testing. This process is repeated ten times, and then the mean accuracy for the algorithm is calculated.
Figure 3
Figure 3
A total of seven texture features were selected for the final model: one histogram (HistPerc 99), one HOG (HogO8b2), four GRLM (GrlmHRLNonUni, GrlmHMGLevNonUni, GrlmNRLNonUni, and GrlmZRLNonUni), and one GLCM (GlcmZ3AngScMom). The information gain attribute evaluator identified that GrlmZRLNonuni was the most important feature in the final model followed by HogO8b2 and GrlmNRLNonUni. The formula of the information gain attribute evaluator was InfoGain(Class, Attribute) = H(Class) − H(Class | Attribute), where H represents the amount of information in a unit called bits and ranges in value between 0 and 1.
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