Paper ID: 2310.06339

Automatic nodule identification and differentiation in ultrasound videos to facilitate per-nodule examination

Siyuan Jiang, Yan Ding, Yuling Wang, Lei Xu, Wenli Dai, Wanru Chang, Jianfeng Zhang, Jie Yu, Jianqiao Zhou, Chunquan Zhang, Ping Liang, Dexing Kong

Ultrasound is a vital diagnostic technique in health screening, with the advantages of non-invasive, cost-effective, and radiation free, and therefore is widely applied in the diagnosis of nodules. However, it relies heavily on the expertise and clinical experience of the sonographer. In ultrasound images, a single nodule might present heterogeneous appearances in different cross-sectional views which makes it hard to perform per-nodule examination. Sonographers usually discriminate different nodules by examining the nodule features and the surrounding structures like gland and duct, which is cumbersome and time-consuming. To address this problem, we collected hundreds of breast ultrasound videos and built a nodule reidentification system that consists of two parts: an extractor based on the deep learning model that can extract feature vectors from the input video clips and a real-time clustering algorithm that automatically groups feature vectors by nodules. The system obtains satisfactory results and exhibits the capability to differentiate ultrasound videos. As far as we know, it's the first attempt to apply re-identification technique in the ultrasonic field.

Submitted: Oct 10, 2023