Federated learning via multi-attention guided UNet for thyroid nodule segmentation of ultrasound images

Accurate segmentation of thyroid nodules is essential for early screening and diagnosis, but it can be challenging due to the nodules' varying sizes and positions. To address this issue, we propose a multi-attention guided UNet (MAUNet) for thyroid nodule segmentation. We use a multi-scale cross attention (MSCA) module for initial image feature extraction. By integrating interactions between features at different scales, the impact of thyroid nodule shape and size on the segmentation results has been reduced. Additionally, we incorporate a dual attention (DA) module into the skip-connection step of the UNet network, which promotes information exchange and fusion between the encoder and decoder. To test the model's robustness and effectiveness, we conduct the extensive experiments on multi-center ultrasound images provided by 17 local hospitals. The model is trained using the federal learning mechanism to ensure privacy protection. The experimental results show that the Dice scores of the model on the data sets from the three centers are 0.908, 0.912 and 0.887, respectively. Compared to existing methods, our method demonstrates higher generalization ability on multi-center datasets and achieves better segmentation results.