Ultrasound Image Segmentation Method of Thyroid Nodules Based on the Improved U-Net Network

An ultrasound image segmentation method of thyroid nodules based on the improved u-net network is proposed in this paper, in order to solve the problem of changeable size of thyroid nodules and difficulty in segmentation due to edge blur of thyroid nodules in the ultrasound image. Firstly, the image is downscaled to extract the features through an encoder path with a residual structure and a multi-scale convolution structure. Secondly, the long skip connection with an attention module is used to maintain the edge contour of characteristic tensor. Finally, the segmentation result is obtained by a decoder path with a residual structure and a multi-scale convolution structure. The experimental results show that with the method proposed in this paper, the average segmentation Dice value reaches 0.7822. It indicates that this method has better segmentation performance than the traditional U-Net method.