A Novel Neutrosophic Method for Automatic Seed Point Selection in Thyroid Nodule Images

The thyroid nodule is one of the endocrine issues caused by an irregular cell development. This rate of survival can be improved by earlier nodule detection. Accordingly, the accurate recognition of the nodule is of the utmost importance in providing powerful results in building the survival rate. The reduction in the accuracy of manual or semiautomatic segmentation methods for thyroid nodule detection is due to many factors, basically, the lack of experience of the sonographer and latency of operation. Most lesion regions in ultrasound images are homogeneous. Therefore, the value of entropy in these regions is high compared to its neighbours. Based on this criterion, a novel procedure for automatically selecting the seed point in thyroid nodule images is proposed. The proposed system consists of three components: neutrosophic image enhancement and speckle reduction to reduce speckle noise and automatic seed selection algorithm extracted from the centre of candidate block in ultrasound thyroid images based on the principle that most of its Higher Order Spectra Entropies (HOSE) from Radon Transform (RT) at different angles are within the range between average and maximum entropies, and the region growing image segmentation is applied with the constant threshold. The performance of proposed automatic segmentation method is compared with other methods in terms of calculating, True Positive (TP) value (96.44 ± 3.01%), False Positive (FP) value (3.55 ± 1.45%), Dice Coefficient (DC) value (92.24 ± 6.47%), Similarity Index (SI) (80.57 ± 1.06%), and Hausdroff Distance (HD) (0.42 ± 0.24 pixels). The proposed system can be considered as an added value to the malignancy diagnosis in thyroid nodule by an endocrinologist.