Thyroid Ultrasound Image Database and Marker Mask Inpainting Method for Research and Development

The main objective of this study was to build a rich and high-quality thyroid ultrasound image database (TUD) for computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems to support accurate diagnosis and prognostic modeling of thyroid disorders. Because most of the raw thyroid ultrasound images contain artificial markers, which seriously affect the robustness of CAD systems because of their strong prior location information, we propose a marker mask inpainting (MMI) method to erase artificial markers and improve image quality.

First, a set of thyroid ultrasound images were collected from the General Hospital of the Northern Theater Command. Then, two modules were designed in MMI, namely, the marker detection (MD) module and marker erasure (ME) module. The MD module detects all markers in the image and stores them in a binary mask. According to the binary mask, the ME module erases the markers and generates an unmarked image. Finally, a new TUD based on the marked images and unmarked images was built. The TUD is carefully annotated and statistically analyzed by professional physicians to ensure accuracy and consistency. Moreover, several normal thyroid gland images and some ancillary information on benign and malignant nodules are provided.

Several typical segmentation models were evaluated on the TUD. The experimental results revealed that our TUD can facilitate the development of more accurate CAD systems for the analysis of thyroid nodule-related lesions in ultrasound images. The effectiveness of our MMI method was determined in quantitative experiments.

The rich and high-quality resource TUD promotes the development of more effective diagnostic and treatment methods for thyroid diseases. Furthermore, MMI for erasing artificial markers and generating unmarked images is proposed to improve the quality of thyroid ultrasound images. Our TUD database is available at https://github.com/NEU-LX/TUD-Datebase.