Research on Classification Method of Medical Ultrasound Image Processing Based on Neural Network

Abstract

In clinical applications, the classification of ultrasound images needs to be processed as an aid to diagnosis. Based on this, a hybrid model of cascaded deep convolutional neural network consisting of two different CNNs and a new classification method are designed and evaluated for its feasibility and effectiveness in ultrasound image classification. A total of 1000 pathological slides of patients with thyroid nodular lesions kept in the Department of Pathology of the First Affiliated Hospital of Lanzhou University, China, were retrospectively collected. After image acquisition, the images were randomly divided into training set, validation set, and test set in the ratio of 4 : 3 : 3. Three convolutional neural network models (VGG 19 model, Inception V3 model, and DenseNet 161 model) with pretraining parameters acquired on the training set were trained, and the models were combined to construct an integrated learning model, and the performance of the models in recognizing pathological images was evaluated based on the test set data. The experimental results show that the VGG 19 model is less effective in classification, with a correct rate of 88.20%, which is lower than that of Inception V3 and DenseNet161 models (92.87% and 92.95%). InceptionV3 and DenseNet161 models have significant advantages in terms of accuracy, number of parameters, and training efficiency, where the DenseNet161 model has faster convergence and better generalization performance, but occupies more video memory in the operation; moreover, the DenseNet161 operation time (1986.48 s) and response time (16 s) are better than the other two models. In addition, the integrated learning of InceptionV3 and DenseNet161 can improve the recognition of pathological images by a single model. Compared with other methods, the performance of the cascaded CNNs proposed in this study is significantly improved, and the multiview strategy can improve the performance of cascaded CNNs. The experimental results demonstrate the potential clinical application of cascaded CNNs, which can provide physicians with an objective second opinion and reduce their heavy workload, in addition to making the diagnosis of thyroid nodules easy and reproducible for people without medical expertise.