Examining Thyroid Cancer Diagnosis: Harnessing Machine Learning for Early Risk Detection

Thyroid cancer is a common type of cancer that begins to form in thyroid gland cells, which has been seen frequently in recent years. Thyroid cancer is a malignancy that develops in the cells of the thyroid gland and is an increasing health problem worldwide. Thyroid cancer grows slowly and usually has no symptoms in the early stages. Therefore, detecting thyroid cancer in the early stages is of great importance. Thyroid cancer is a type of disease with high treatment success when the risk is detected at an early stage, and correct diagnosis and treatment is applied to prevent cancer. Therefore, this study aimed to detect the risk of thyroid cancer at an early stage with the help of computer-aided systems. Thanks to these systems, experts' workloads will be lightened, and the errors experts can make will be minimized. This study used four machine learning methods to determine the risk stage of thyroid cancer. The dataset used in the study is a public data set and consists of 16 features and 383 samples. Different performance measurement metrics were used to evaluate the performance of the models. As a result, when the results obtained in the study were examined, it was shown that machine learning methods achieved competitive results in detecting the risk of thyroid cancer.