Enhancing diagnostic precision for thyroid C-TIRADS category 4 nodules: a hybrid deep learning and machine learning model integrating grayscale and elastographic ultrasound features

Background: Accurate and timely diagnosis of thyroid cancer is critical for clinical care, and artificial intelligence can enhance this process. This study aims to develop and validate an intelligent assessment model called C-TNet, based on the Chinese Guidelines for Ultrasound Malignancy Risk Stratification of Thyroid Nodules (C-TIRADS) and real-time elasticity imaging. The goal is to differentiate between benign and malignant characteristics of thyroid nodules classified as C-TIRADS category 4. We evaluated the performance of C-TNet against ultrasonographers and BMNet, a model trained exclusively on histopathological findings indicating benign or malignant nature. 

Methods: The study included 3,545 patients with pathologically confirmed C-TIRADS category 4 thyroid nodules from two tertiary hospitals in China: Affiliated Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine, Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine (n=3,463 patients) and Jiangyin People’s Hospital (n=82 patients). The cohort from Affiliated Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine, Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine was randomly divided into a training set and validation set (7:3 ratio), while the cohort from Jiangyin People’s Hospital served as the external validation set. The C-TNet model was developed by extracting image features from the training set and integrating them with six commonly used classifier algorithms: logistic regression (LR), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), random forest (RF), kernel support vector machine (K-SVM), adaptive boosting (AdaBoost), and Naive Bayes (NB). Its performance was evaluated using both internal and external validation sets, with statistical differences analyzed through the Chi-squared test. 

Results: C-TNet model effectively integrates feature extraction from deep neural networks with a RF classifier, utilizing grayscale and elastography ultrasound data. It successfully differentiates benign from malignant thyroid nodules, achieving an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.873, comparable to the performance of senior physicians (AUC: 0.868). 

Conclusions: The model demonstrates generalizability across diverse clinical settings, positioning itself as a transformative decision-support tool for enhancing the risk stratification of thyroid nodules.