Can We Improve Thyroid Fine-needle Aspiration Cytology Adequacy in a Low-volume Thyroid Center?

Abstract

I ntroduction: Thyroid cancer is the most common endocrine malignancy, and has shown an increase in incidence in recent decades. Fine-needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) is the mainstay of assessment of thyroid nodules and diagnosis of malignancy. Several reports have suggested that ultrasound (US)-guided FNAC has many advantages over palpation-guided biopsy. . Also, time to diagnostic FNAC was significantly shorter in the SUS-FNAC group: 24.2 ± 4.5 versus 54.9 ± 11.4 days (p=0.01, unpaired t-test). Conclusion: SUS-guided FNAC for thyroid nodules is a safe and simple technique. This study demonstrates that it leads to improved patient care by reducing inadequacy rate and time to diagnosis in a low-volume thyroid center. KeywordsThyroid nodule, surgeon-performed ultrasonography, fine-needle aspiration cytology (FNAC), adequacy Disclosure: Mohamed Shaaban, Mario Metry, and Sebastian Aspinall have no conflicts of interest to declare. No funding was received in the publication of this article. Approval was obtained to carry out this audit, verbal consent was obtained for each fine-needle aspiration procedure.Compliance with Ethics: All procedures were followed in accordance with the responsible committee on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975 and subsequent revisions.Authorship: All named authors meet the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) criteria for authorship of this manuscript, take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole, and have given final approval to the version to be published.Open Access: This article is published under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License, which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, adaptation, and reproduction provided the original author(s) and source are given appropriate credit. Thyroid cancer is the most common endocrine malignancy, and has increased in incidence in recent decades.

Effects of Rapid On-Site Evaluation on Diagnostic Accuracy of Thyroid Fine-Needle Aspiration

“…While the use of ultrasound for guided FNA has already increased the diagnostic accuracy in general [15], implementation of ROSE has the capacity to additionally improve the diagnostic yield with less necessity for repeat FNA. In 1992, Eisele et al [16] observed that an immediate cytopathological procurement and evaluation of specimen led to a significant reduction of unsatisfactory results in head and neck masses.…”