Computer-aided diagnosis system for classifying benign and malignant thyroid nodules in multi-stained FNAB cytological images.

An automated computer-aided diagnosis system is developed to classify benign and malignant thyroid nodules using multi-stained fine needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) cytological images. In the first phase, the image segmentation is performed to remove the background staining information and retain the appropriate foreground cell objects in cytological images using mathematical morphology and watershed transform segmentation methods. Subsequently, statistical features are extracted using two-level discrete wavelet transform (DWT) decomposition, gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) and Gabor filter based methods.