Multi-teacher knowledge extraction for prostate cancer recognition in intelligent medical assistance systems

Designing intelligent diagnosis of prostate diseases in intelligent medical assistance systems has gradually become a research hotspot. However, rectal ultrasound (TRUS) as the main diagnostic tool for prostate diseases remains a challenging issue. (1) Due to limited prostate TRUS imaging data, it is difficult to train a robust deep learning model. (2) In terms of visual features, ultrasound images of prostate cancer are similar to TRUS images of other tissues and organs, so it is difficult for a single neural network model to accurately learn the feature representation of the disease. To address the above problems, we first establish a high-quality dataset for prostate TRUS imaging, and then design multi teacher knowledge distillation to achieve accurate disease recognition. The experimental results show that, compared with knowledge distillation without a teacher model and a single teacher model, knowledge distillation using multiple teacher models can significantly improve the accuracy of prostate TRUS image cancer prediction. As the number of teacher models increases, the accuracy rate is further improved, which verifies the effectiveness of this method in intelligent systems.