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Sant VR, Radhachandran A, Ivezic V, Lee DT, Livhits MJ, Wu JX, Masamed R, Arnold CW, Yeh MW, Speier W. From Bench-to-Bedside: How Artificial Intelligence is Changing Thyroid Nodule Diagnostics, a Systematic Review. J Clin Endocrinol Metab 2024; 109:1684-1693. [PMID: 38679750 PMCID: PMC11180510 DOI: 10.1210/clinem/dgae277] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/30/2024] [Revised: 04/04/2024] [Accepted: 04/16/2024] [Indexed: 05/01/2024]
Abstract
CONTEXT Use of artificial intelligence (AI) to predict clinical outcomes in thyroid nodule diagnostics has grown exponentially over the past decade. The greatest challenge is in understanding the best model to apply to one's own patient population, and how to operationalize such a model in practice. EVIDENCE ACQUISITION A literature search of PubMed and IEEE Xplore was conducted for English-language publications between January 1, 2015 and January 1, 2023, studying diagnostic tests on suspected thyroid nodules that used AI. We excluded articles without prospective or external validation, nonprimary literature, duplicates, focused on nonnodular thyroid conditions, not using AI, and those incidentally using AI in support of an experimental diagnostic outside standard clinical practice. Quality was graded by Oxford level of evidence. EVIDENCE SYNTHESIS A total of 61 studies were identified; all performed external validation, 16 studies were prospective, and 33 compared a model to physician prediction of ground truth. Statistical validation was reported in 50 papers. A diagnostic pipeline was abstracted, yielding 5 high-level outcomes: (1) nodule localization, (2) ultrasound (US) risk score, (3) molecular status, (4) malignancy, and (5) long-term prognosis. Seven prospective studies validated a single commercial AI; strengths included automating nodule feature assessment from US and assisting the physician in predicting malignancy risk, while weaknesses included automated margin prediction and interobserver variability. CONCLUSION Models predominantly used US images to predict malignancy. Of 4 Food and Drug Administration-approved products, only S-Detect was extensively validated. Implementing an AI model locally requires data sanitization and revalidation to ensure appropriate clinical performance.
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Affiliation(s)
- Vivek R Sant
- Division of Endocrine Surgery, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX 75390, USA
| | - Ashwath Radhachandran
- Biomedical Artificial Intelligence Research Lab, UCLA Department of Bioengineering, Los Angeles, CA 90024, USA
| | - Vedrana Ivezic
- Biomedical Artificial Intelligence Research Lab, UCLA Department of Bioengineering, Los Angeles, CA 90024, USA
| | - Denise T Lee
- Department of Surgery, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York, NY 10029, USA
| | - Masha J Livhits
- Section of Endocrine Surgery, UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
| | - James X Wu
- Section of Endocrine Surgery, UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
| | - Rinat Masamed
- Department of Radiology, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
| | - Corey W Arnold
- Biomedical Artificial Intelligence Research Lab, UCLA Department of Bioengineering, Los Angeles, CA 90024, USA
| | - Michael W Yeh
- Section of Endocrine Surgery, UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA
| | - William Speier
- Biomedical Artificial Intelligence Research Lab, UCLA Department of Bioengineering, Los Angeles, CA 90024, USA
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Xu J, Xu HL, Cao YN, Huang Y, Gao S, Wu QJ, Gong TT. The performance of deep learning on thyroid nodule imaging predicts thyroid cancer: A systematic review and meta-analysis of epidemiological studies with independent external test sets. Diabetes Metab Syndr 2023; 17:102891. [PMID: 37907027 DOI: 10.1016/j.dsx.2023.102891] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/22/2023] [Revised: 10/06/2023] [Accepted: 10/15/2023] [Indexed: 11/02/2023]
Abstract
BACKGROUND AND AIMS It is still controversial whether deep learning (DL) systems add accuracy to thyroid nodule imaging classification based on the recent available evidence. We conducted this study to analyze the current evidence of DL in thyroid nodule imaging diagnosis in both internal and external test sets. METHODS Until the end of December 2022, PubMed, IEEE, Embase, Web of Science, and the Cochrane Library were searched. We included primary epidemiological studies using externally validated DL techniques in image-based thyroid nodule appraisal. This systematic review was registered on PROSPERO (CRD42022362892). RESULTS We evaluated evidence from 17 primary epidemiological studies using externally validated DL techniques in image-based thyroid nodule appraisal. Fourteen studies were deemed eligible for meta-analysis. The pooled sensitivity, specificity, and area under the curve (AUC) of these DL algorithms were 0.89 (95% confidence interval 0.87-0.90), 0.84 (0.82-0.86), and 0.93 (0.91-0.95), respectively. For the internal validation set, the pooled sensitivity, specificity, and AUC were 0.91 (0.89-0.93), 0.88 (0.85-0.91), and 0.96 (0.93-0.97), respectively. In the external validation set, the pooled sensitivity, specificity, and AUC were 0.87 (0.85-0.89), 0.81 (0.77-0.83), and 0.91 (0.88-0.93), respectively. Notably, in subgroup analyses, DL algorithms still demonstrated exceptional diagnostic validity. CONCLUSIONS Current evidence suggests DL-based imaging shows diagnostic performances comparable to clinicians for differentiating thyroid nodules in both the internal and external test sets.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jin Xu
- Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, China
| | - He-Li Xu
- Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, China
| | - Yi-Ning Cao
- Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, China; Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, China
| | - Ying Huang
- Department of Ultrasound, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, China
| | - Song Gao
- Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, China
| | - Qi-Jun Wu
- Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, China; Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, China; Key Laboratory of Reproductive and Genetic Medicine (China Medical University), National Health Commission, Shenyang, China.
| | - Ting-Ting Gong
- Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University, Shenyang, China.
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Toro-Tobon D, Loor-Torres R, Duran M, Fan JW, Singh Ospina N, Wu Y, Brito JP. Artificial Intelligence in Thyroidology: A Narrative Review of the Current Applications, Associated Challenges, and Future Directions. Thyroid 2023; 33:903-917. [PMID: 37279303 PMCID: PMC10440669 DOI: 10.1089/thy.2023.0132] [Citation(s) in RCA: 6] [Impact Index Per Article: 6.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/08/2023]
Abstract
Background: The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care has grown exponentially with the promise of facilitating biomedical research and enhancing diagnosis, treatment, monitoring, disease prevention, and health care delivery. We aim to examine the current state, limitations, and future directions of AI in thyroidology. Summary: AI has been explored in thyroidology since the 1990s, and currently, there is an increasing interest in applying AI to improve the care of patients with thyroid nodules (TNODs), thyroid cancer, and functional or autoimmune thyroid disease. These applications aim to automate processes, improve the accuracy and consistency of diagnosis, personalize treatment, decrease the burden for health care professionals, improve access to specialized care in areas lacking expertise, deepen the understanding of subtle pathophysiologic patterns, and accelerate the learning curve of less experienced clinicians. There are promising results for many of these applications. Yet, most are in the validation or early clinical evaluation stages. Only a few are currently adopted for risk stratification of TNODs by ultrasound and determination of the malignant nature of indeterminate TNODs by molecular testing. Challenges of the currently available AI applications include the lack of prospective and multicenter validations and utility studies, small and low diversity of training data sets, differences in data sources, lack of explainability, unclear clinical impact, inadequate stakeholder engagement, and inability to use outside of the research setting, which might limit the value of their future adoption. Conclusions: AI has the potential to improve many aspects of thyroidology; however, addressing the limitations affecting the suitability of AI interventions in thyroidology is a prerequisite to ensure that AI provides added value for patients with thyroid disease.
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Affiliation(s)
- David Toro-Tobon
- Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, Metabolism and Nutrition, Department of Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, USA
| | - Ricardo Loor-Torres
- Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, Metabolism and Nutrition, Department of Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, USA
| | - Mayra Duran
- Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, Metabolism and Nutrition, Department of Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, USA
| | - Jungwei W. Fan
- Department of Artificial Intelligence and Informatics, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, USA
| | - Naykky Singh Ospina
- Division of Endocrinology, Department of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA
| | - Yonghui Wu
- Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics, College of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA
| | - Juan P. Brito
- Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes, Metabolism and Nutrition, Department of Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, USA
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Xiang Z, Zhuo Q, Zhao C, Deng X, Zhu T, Wang T, Jiang W, Lei B. Self-supervised multi-modal fusion network for multi-modal thyroid ultrasound image diagnosis. Comput Biol Med 2022; 150:106164. [PMID: 36240597 DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2022.106164] [Citation(s) in RCA: 11] [Impact Index Per Article: 5.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/08/2022] [Revised: 09/11/2022] [Accepted: 10/01/2022] [Indexed: 12/07/2022]
Abstract
Ultrasound is a typical non-invasive diagnostic method often used to detect thyroid cancer lesions. However, due to the limitations of the information provided by ultrasound images, shear wave elastography (SWE) and color doppler ultrasound (CDUS) are also used clinically to assist in diagnosis, which makes the diagnosis time-consuming, labor-intensive, and highly subjective process. Therefore, automatic diagnosis of benign and malignant thyroid nodules is beneficial for the clinical diagnosis of the thyroid. To this end, based on three modalities of gray-scale ultrasound images(US), SWE, and CDUS, we propose a deep learning-based multi-modal feature fusion network for the automatic diagnosis of thyroid disease based on the ultrasound images. First, three ResNet18s initialized by self-supervised learning are used as branches to extract the image information of each modality, respectively. Then, a multi-modal multi-head attention branch is used to remove the common information of three modalities, and the knowledge of each modal is combined for thyroid diagnosis. At the same time, to better integrate the features between modalities, a multi-modal feature guidance module is also proposed to guide the feature extraction of each branch and reduce the difference between each-modal feature. We verify the multi-modal thyroid ultrasound image diagnosis method on the self-collected dataset, and the results prove that this method could provide fast and accurate assistance for sonographers in diagnosing thyroid nodules.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zhuo Xiang
- National-Regional Key Technology Engineering Laboratory for Medical Ultrasound, Guangdong Key Laboratory for Biomedical Measurements and Ultrasound Imaging, School of Biomedical Engineering, Health Science Centre, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
| | - Qiuluan Zhuo
- Huazhong University of Science and Technology Union Shenzhen Hospital, Department of Ultrasound, China
| | - Cheng Zhao
- National-Regional Key Technology Engineering Laboratory for Medical Ultrasound, Guangdong Key Laboratory for Biomedical Measurements and Ultrasound Imaging, School of Biomedical Engineering, Health Science Centre, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
| | - Xiaofei Deng
- Huazhong University of Science and Technology Union Shenzhen Hospital, Department of Ultrasound, China
| | - Ting Zhu
- Huazhong University of Science and Technology Union Shenzhen Hospital, Department of Ultrasound, China
| | - Tianfu Wang
- National-Regional Key Technology Engineering Laboratory for Medical Ultrasound, Guangdong Key Laboratory for Biomedical Measurements and Ultrasound Imaging, School of Biomedical Engineering, Health Science Centre, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
| | - Wei Jiang
- Huazhong University of Science and Technology Union Shenzhen Hospital, Department of Ultrasound, China.
| | - Baiying Lei
- National-Regional Key Technology Engineering Laboratory for Medical Ultrasound, Guangdong Key Laboratory for Biomedical Measurements and Ultrasound Imaging, School of Biomedical Engineering, Health Science Centre, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China.
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