Multimodal ultrasound and ultrasound-guided fine-needle aspiration biopsy for distinguishing benign and malignant thyroid nodules of C-TIRADS grade 4 / 中国医学影像技术

ABSTRACT

Objective To compare the value of multimodal ultrasound and ultrasound-guided fine-needle aspiration biopsy(US-FNAB)for distinguishing benign and malignant thyroid nodules of Chinese thyroid imaging reporting and data system(C-TIRADS)grade 4.Methods Data of 247 thyroid nodules in 201 patients were retrospectively analyzed,including 193 malignant and 54 benign noes.Taken postoperative pathology as the gold standards,the value of multimodal ultrasound,i.e.the combination of conventional ultrasound,shear wave elastography(SWE)and contrast-enhanced ultrasound(CEUS)and US-FNAB for distinguishing benign and malignant thyroid nodules were compared.Results The sensitivity,specificity,accuracy,misdiagnosis rate and rate of missed diagnosis of conventional ultrasound for diagnosing malignant thyroid nodules was 86.53％,59.26％,80.57％,40.74％and 13.47％,respectively,of SWE was 78.76％,74.07％,77.73％,25.93％and 21.24％,respectively,of CEUS was 90.16％,77.78％,87.45％,22.22％and 9.84％,respectively,while of multimodal ultrasound was 97.93％,88.89％,95.95％,11.11％and 2.07％,respectively,and of US-FNAB was 89.64％,96.30％,91.09％,3.70％and 10.36％,respectively.The sensitivity,specificity and accuracy of multimodal ultrasound for distinguishing benign and malignant thyroid nodules were higher,while the misdiagnosis rate and missed diagnosis rate were lower than those of conventional ultrasound,SWE and CEUS alone.The sensitivity,accuracy and misdiagnosis rate of multimodal ultrasound were higher,while its specificity and missed diagnosis rate were both lower than those of US-FNAB(all P＜0.05).Conclusion For distinguishing benign and malignant thyroid nodules of C-TIRADS grade 4,multimodal ultrasound had higher sensitivity and accuracy but higher misdiagnosis rate,while US-FNAB had higher specificity but also higher missed diagnosis rate.