Deep Learning Based on B-Mode and Color Doppler Ultrasound for Differentiation of Primary Thyroid Lymphoma and...

Background/Objectives: Primary thyroid lymphoma (PTL), including diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) and mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue (MALT) lymphoma, share substantial overlap in ultrasound appearance with Hashimoto's thyroiditis (HT), making preoperative differentiation challenging. This study aims to develop and validate a deep learning model based on B-mode ultrasound (BMUS) and color Doppler ultrasound (CDUS) for image-level differentiation of DLBCL, MALT lymphoma, and HT. Methods: This retrospective single-center study included 1294 ultrasound images from 290 patients (313 lesions) who underwent preoperative ultrasound examination at West China Hospital between September 2002 and September 2024. All images from the same lesion were assigned to the same data partition, and the dataset was split at the lesion level into training and test sets at an 8:2 ratio. A Frequency-Adaptive WT-ResNet model incorporating wavelet transform convolution and a frequency-adaptive gating mechanism was developed. The primary analysis was performed at the image level. The performance of the model was compared with that of three ultrasound physicians with different levels of experience. Grad-CAM was used for visual interpretation. An exploratory external validation was performed using an independent dataset from Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital. Results: In the test set, the model achieved a macro-average AUC of 0.927 (95% CI: 0.889-0.960), with class-specific AUCs of 0.899 for DLBCL, 0.946 for MALT lymphoma, and 0.937 for HT. The macro-average balanced accuracy was 0.866, compared with 0.827 for that of the best-performing senior physician. The exploratory validation set yielded a macro-average AUC of 0.796 (95% CI: 0.686-0.888), with class-specific AUCs of 0.806 for DLBCL, 0.825 for HT, and 0.756 for MALT lymphoma. Grad-CAM showed that the model focused on lesion-internal echotexture and lesion-transition regions with class-dependent patterns. Conclusions: A deep learning model based on BMUS and CDUS showed promising performance for image-level differentiation of DLBCL, MALT lymphoma and HT in a single-center retrospective cohort. The model outperformed three ultrasound physicians and may serve as a potential decision-support tool. However, the exploratory external validation results should be interpreted as preliminary, and larger multicenter cohorts remain necessary to confirm model generalizability.