2017 International Conference on Current Research in Computer Science and Information Technology (ICCIT), Slemani - Iraq
Image Processing Technique for Determining Cold
Thyroid Nodules
Amir Torab-Miandoab, Peyman Rezaei-hachesu
Department of Health Information Technology, School of
Management and Medical Informatics, Tabriz University of
Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran
toraba@tbzmed.ac.ir; rezaeip@tbzmed.ac.ir
Abstract—Image processing is a technique that can be applied
on medical images for detecting abnormalities such as tumors.
Due to risk of malignancy, detecting and diagnosing of cold
nodules in thyroid gland are important. We applied Image
Enhancement (circular averaging filter, morphological opening
by diamond structure element, division of results, transforming
colorful image in to gray image), Image segmentation
(thresholding) and feature extraction (hill climbing algorithm) to
determine cold thyroid nodules automatically with high accuracy.
Keywords—Image processing; Thyroid Cancer; Cold Thyroid
Nodules; Hill climbing; Feature Extractioncomponent
I. INTRODUCTION
The thyroid gland is located in front of larynx, under
Adam’s apple in the neck. This gland has 2 lobes and looks
like a butterfly. Thyroid gland is one of the endocrine glands
that produce thyroid hormones. It controls heart rate
regulation, weight, body temperature, and blood pressure by
thyroid hormones. It also can affect childhood intelligence,
growth and adult metabolism [1-5].
Image processing is a technique that can be used in
detecting objects in images. This technique is widely being
used in medical science for detecting diseases. It can
implement various algorithms to process medical images [6,
7]. For diagnosing thyroid nodules, various imaging
technologies such as Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI),
Radiology, Radioactive iodine scan, Computed tomography
and ultra-sonography (US) are performed [7]. Among them we
studied radioactive iodine scan of thyroid due to high
accuracy.
With the development of molecular imaging technologies,
diagnosis and treatment of thyroid nodules are being
improved. Molecular imaging technology performed by
radioactive iodine uptake can be used widely for thyroid
nodules treatment [8]. Thyroid uptakes radioactive iodine in
the form of hot, warm and cold nodules. Due to risk of
malignancy diagnosis of cold nodules is important [9]. The
aim of this article is to implement algorithms of image
processing to detect the cold nodules in thyroid radioactive
images.
978-1-5386-2955-0/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
Taha Samad, Sogand Habibi-Chenaran
Department of Health Information Technology, School of
Management and Medical Informatics, Tabriz University of
Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran
taha.soltany@gmail.com; sogandhabibi36@gmail.com
II. METHOD
The first step of our image processing for detecting cold
nodules in thyroid radioactive images is image preprocessing.
Image preprocessing or image enhancement is done to
eliminate any kind of noise, corruption or interference or in
other words enhancing and making image in better way. To
achieve this step, we applied a spatial linear filter (circular
averaging filter) and morphological opening by diamond
structure element on the RGB thyroid radioactive image
separately. Then we divided the results of the previous
processes. After that, we transformed the result image into
gray scale.
The second step is image segmentation which means
dividing and segmenting the enhanced image by thresholding.
The last step is feature extraction which means finding
Region of Interest (ROI) using hill climbing algorithm. This
algorithm will be run 100 times on the segmented image to
find ROI with highest white pixels.
For best of knowledge, the flowchart in Fig. 1 illustrates
our method, step by step. We implemented our method in
MATLAB R2013a.
III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
A. Image Enhancement
Image enhancement or image preprocessing is applied on
the image to improve the perception of data for automatic
image processing detection. Spatial and frequency domain
methods are the known image enhancement techniques [6,
10]. The first step of Image enhancement is to apply filter
(Circular averaging filter) and morphological opening by
diamond structure element to the RGB Thyroid Radioactive
Image, in parallel. Both of these processes belong to spatial
domain methods. Now consider an image in Fig. 2.
The result of applying circular averaging filter and
morphological opening by diamond structure element of Fig. 2
are illustrated in Fig. 3 and Fig. 4, respectively. Now it's time
to divide Fig. 3 by Fig. 4 where the result is illustrated in Fig.
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2017 International Conference on Current Research in Computer Science and Information Technology (ICCIT), Slemani - Iraq

5. Now we need to transform the produced image in Fig. 5 to

gray scale. The result is illustrated in Fig. 6.

Fig. 3. Result of Fig 2 after applying Circular averaging filter.

Fig. 4. Result of Fig. 2 morphological opening by diamond structure

element.

Fig1. Flowchart of method step by step.

Fig. 5. Division of Fig 3 by Fig 4.

Fig. 2. RGB Thyroid Radioactive Image.

Fig. 6. Gray scale of Fig. 5.

B. Image Segmentation
Image segmentation is an inseparable part of any image
description and recognition technique which can divide image
into regions [11]. Detection of abnormalities like tumors and

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2017 International Conference on Current Research in Computer Science and Information Technology (ICCIT), Slemani - Iraq
tissue classification can be determined by image segmentation.
It gives label to every pixel of image so the pixels with same
label have same characteristics, which means it can make the
medical image easy to analyze [12]. Discontinuity and
similarity are properties of Image segmentation which are
based on edge and histogram thresholding respectively [10].
Thresholding is one of the most important approaches of
image segmentation during the past 20 years. After applying
thresholding on a gray image, the pixels will change into
logical (1 or 0). Thresholding can increase the speed of
processing and reduce the space that is needed to store the
image [13]. Fig. 7 is the result of Fig. 6 after thresholding.
Fig. 7. Apply thresholding on Fig. 6.
C. Feature Extraction
After applying image enhancement and image
segmentation, we could only make the image clear but it's not
enough since the ROI is not found automatically so we need to
implement an algorithm to determine the ROI (Cold nodule).
For this reason we implemented a hill climbing algorithm with
100 runs to determine the ROI. Other articles have applied
artificial neural networks, genetic algorithm, Fuzzy support
Vector Machines and Support Vector Machines [7, 14, 15]
while they have focused on US images. Hill climbing
algorithm is an optimization technique which works with
random numbers and finds local optimums [16]. By applying a
hill climbing algorithm on Fig. 7, a random point will be
chosen from white regions of image. The algorithm starts to
count white pixels from that point to North, North West, North
East, South, South West, South East until it reaches to black
region. The algorithm repeats this 100 times and shows ROI
with the highest count as the cold nodule place. The best result
is illustrated in Fig. 8.
Fig. 8. Cold nodule detection after running hill climbing 100 times.
IV. CONCULSION
In this paper we mentioned how much detecting and
diagnosing of cold nodules is important since it has high risk
of thyroid cancer. We also applied image processing
techniques including Image Enhancement (circular averaging
filter, morphological opening by diamond structure element,
division of results, transforming RGB in to gray), Image
segmentation (thresholding). These techniques couldn't
determine the cold nodules so we applied a hill climbing
algorithm since it was much simpler than artificial neural
networks, genetic algorithms, Fuzzy support Vector Machines
and Support Vector Machines.
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