Differential diagnosis of thyroid nodule capsules using random forest guided selection of image features

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 12; no. 1; p. 21636
• Main Authors: Eftimie, Lucian G., Glogojeanu, Remus R., Tejaswee, A., Gheorghita, Pavel, Stanciu, Stefan G., Chirila, Augustin, Stanciu, George A., Paul, Angshuman, Hristu, Radu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 14.12.2022; Nature Publishing Group; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: 631/67/1459/1843; 639/766/930/2735; 692/698/1460/568; Adenoma; Adenoma - pathology; Capsules; Collagen; Diagnosis, Differential; Differential diagnosis; Histopathology; Humanities and Social Sciences; Humans; Image processing; Microscopy; multidisciplinary; Nodules; Papillary thyroid carcinoma; Pathology; Random Forest; Scanners; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Thyroid; Thyroid cancer; Thyroid Neoplasms - diagnostic imaging; Thyroid Neoplasms - pathology; Thyroid Nodule - diagnostic imaging; Thyroid Nodule - pathology; Tumors; Ultrasonic imaging
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-25788-w

Microscopic evaluation of tissue sections stained with hematoxylin and eosin is the current gold standard for diagnosing thyroid pathology. Digital pathology is gaining momentum providing the pathologist with additional cues to traditional routes when placing a diagnosis, therefore it is extremely important to develop new image analysis methods that can extract image features with diagnostic potential. In this work, we use histogram and texture analysis to extract features from microscopic images acquired on thin thyroid nodule capsules sections and demonstrate how they enable the differential diagnosis of thyroid nodules. Targeted thyroid nodules are benign (i.e., follicular adenoma) and malignant (i.e., papillary thyroid carcinoma and its sub-type arising within a follicular adenoma). Our results show that the considered image features can enable the quantitative characterization of the collagen capsule surrounding thyroid nodules and provide an accurate classification of the latter’s type using random forest.