ThyFusion: A lightweight attribute enhancement module for thyroid nodule diagnosis using gradient and frequency-domain awareness

Accurate classification of thyroid nodules is a critical step in clinical diagnosis and plays a crucial role in guiding subsequent treatment planning. However, current deep learning methods lack the ability to effectively perceive the attributes of thyroid nodules. Specifically, convolutional neural network-based methods struggle to capture fine-grained attributes, such as echogenic foci, due to repeated downsampling operations. On the other hand, Transformer-based methods partition the image into blocks, which hinders the capture of continuous attributes such as margins, and require a large number of parameters. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a novel lightweight attribute enhancement module called ThyFusion. Firstly, a multi-scale Gaussian filtering attention module is developed to accurately capture fine-grained information. Secondly, a frequency-domain global regulation module is proposed to regulate global features and capture coarse-grained attributes. Finally, a cross domain mutual learning module is presented to fuse fine-grained and coarse-grained attributes. Extensive experiments were conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of ThyFusion, and it was compared against 15 benchmark methods. ThyFusion achieves higher accuracy, F1 score, recall, and precision (87.18%, 87.12%, 87.36% and 87.10%). ThyFusion is a plug-and-play lightweight module that can be embedded behind any layer of a backbone network to enhance the accuracy of thyroid nodule classification. The advantages of ThyFusion in thyroid nodule classification can greatly streamline the process of automated diagnosis and improve the accuracy of thyroid diagnosis.