Artificial intelligence may be used to identify benign thyroid nodules

ATLANTA -- An ultrasound-based artificial intelligence classifier of thyroid nodules identified benign nodules with sensitivity similar to fine-needle aspiration, according to data presented at ENDO 2022. "Artificial analysis of thyroid ultrasound images can identify nodules that are very unlikely to be malignant," Nikita Pozdeyev, MD, PhD, assistant professor at University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, told Healio. "These are mostly spongiform nodules that have a less than 3% probability of malignancy." Pozdeyev and colleagues trained a supervised deep learning classifier of thyroid nodules on 32,545 images of 621 thyroid nodules acquired from University of Washington. The classifier was then tested on an independent set of 145 nodules collected from the University of Colorado.