Key-frame Guided Network for Thyroid Nodule Recognition using Ultrasound Videos

Ultrasound examination is widely used in the clinical diagnosis of thyroid nodules (benign/malignant). However, the accuracy relies heavily on radiologist experience. Although deep learning techniques have been investigated for thyroid nodules recognition. Current solutions are mainly based on static ultrasound images, with limited temporal information used and inconsistent with clinical diagnosis. This paper proposes a novel method for the automated recognition of thyroid nodules through an exhaustive exploration of ultrasound videos and key-frames. We first propose a detection-localization framework to automatically identify the clinical key-frame with a typical nodule in each ultrasound video. Based on the localized key-frame, we develop a key-frame guided video classification model for thyroid nodule recognition. Besides, we introduce a motion attention module to help the network focus on significant frames in an ultrasound video, which is consistent with clinical diagnosis. The proposed thyroid nodule recognition framework is validated on clinically collected ultrasound videos, demonstrating superior performance compared with other state-of-the-art methods.

2nd Place Solution to Instance Segmentation of IJCAI 3D AI Challenge 2020

Compared with MS-COCO, the dataset for the competition has a larger proportion of large objects which area is greater than 96x96 pixels. As getting fine boundaries is vitally important for large object segmentation, Mask R-CNN with PointRend is selected as the base segmentation framework to output high-quality object boundaries. Besides, a better engine that integrates ResNeSt, FPN and DCNv2, and a range of effective tricks that including multi-scale training and test time augmentation are applied to improve segmentation performance. Our best performance is an ensemble of four models (three PointRend-based models and SOLOv2), which won the 2nd place in IJCAI-PRICAI 3D AI Challenge 2020: Instance Segmentation.