# Ultrasound Image Segmentation of Thyroid Nodule via Latent Semantic Feature Co-Registration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.09221 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09221/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02025/) (2015)
- [Generalizing to Unseen Domains: A Survey on Domain Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03097/) (2021)
- [VoxelMorph: A Learning Framework for Deformable Medical Image Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05231/) (2018)
- [Learning Deconvolution Network for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04366/) (2015)
- [FFA-Net: Feature Fusion Attention Network for Single Image Dehazing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.07559/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Bidirectional Cross-Modality Adaptation via Deeply Synergistic Image and Feature Alignment for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.02255/) (2020)
- [Weakly-Supervised Convolutional Neural Networks for Multimodal Image Registration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03361/) (2018)
- [Joint Domain Alignment and Discriminative Feature Learning for Unsupervised Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09347/) (2018)
- [Rethinking Data Augmentation for Single-source Domain Generalization in Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.14805/) (2022)
- [TransDeepLab: Convolution-Free Transformer-based DeepLab v3+ for Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.00713/) (2022)
- [BANet: Bidirectional Aggregation Network with Occlusion Handling for Panoptic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.14031/) (2020)
- [Atlas-ISTN: Joint Segmentation, Registration and Atlas Construction with Image-and-Spatial Transformer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10533/) (2020)
- [Aladdin: Joint Atlas Building and Diffeomorphic Registration Learning with Pairwise Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03563/) (2022)
- [Cross-Modality Multi-Atlas Segmentation via Deep Registration and Label Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02000/) (2022)
- [Boosting multiple sclerosis lesion segmentation through attention mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10790/) (2023)
- [Cross-Modality Multi-Atlas Segmentation Using Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08946/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Segmentation of nodules in thyroid ultrasound imaging plays a crucial role in the detection and treatment of thyroid cancer. However, owing to the diversity of scanner vendors and imaging protocols in different hospitals, the automatic segmentation model, which has already demonstrated expert-level accuracy in the field of medical image segmentation, finds its accuracy reduced as the result of its weak generalization performance when being applied in clinically realistic environments. To address this issue, the present paper proposes ASTN, a framework for thyroid nodule segmentation achieved through a new type co-registration network. By extracting latent semantic information from the atlas and target images and utilizing in-depth features to accomplish the co-registration of nodules in thyroid ultrasound images, this framework can ensure the integrity of anatomical structure and reduce the impact on segmentation as the result of overall differences in image caused by different devices. In addition, this paper also provides an atlas selection algorithm to mitigate the difficulty of co-registration. As shown by the evaluation results collected from the datasets of different devices, thanks to the method we proposed, the model generalization has been greatly improved while maintaining a high level of segmentation accuracy.