To accomplish the automatic classification of thyroid nodules, the local texture features combining with the multiple instance learning method is proposed to overcome the overlap of the thyroid nodules. The local texture features are abstracted from the region of interest which is taken as the instance package composed of local features. The citation-kNN algorithm of the multi-instance learning(MIL) method is adopted to classify samples of this paper. Experimental results show that the identification method has higher classification accuracy and the accuracy achieves 85.59%. It is expected to be applied to the clinical diagnosis of thyroid, and provide a valuable reference for other related domains.