Fig. 8: Evaluation of US scans collected by the FARUS and five doctors.

a The in-plane/out-of-plane US image sequences acquired by the FARUS and five experienced doctors on the same two participants. The green contour in the US images represent the segmented suspicious nodules by our proposed VariaNet, while the yellow contour represent the segmented thyroid lobe by our pre-trained gland segmentation model. b–e Violin plots illustrating the four evaluation metrics between FARUS and five doctors. Dashed line indicates median; dotted lines indicate 25th and 75th percentiles; n = 13 participants. f–i Boxplots displaying the four evaluation metrics between FARUS and five doctors. ROPS robotic out of-plane scanning, DOPS doctor out-of-plane scanning, RIPS robotic in-plane scanning, DIPS doctor in-plane scanning, LRIS left–right intensity symmetry. The top, middle, and bottom boundaries of the boxplots represent 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile, respectively; the small squares represent the mean. Outliers defined when value larger than 1.5*IQR + 75th percentile; n = 13 participants; p value obtained with bootstrap tests; ****p < 0.0005. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.