<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><bold>Objective:</bold> To evaluate and demonstrate the accuracy of fine-needle aspiration (FNA) in thyroid lesions in our department and to highlight probable causes of errors leading to unsatisfactory sampling, which may depend on the characteristics of the nodule.<bold>Methods:</bold> This is a retrospective study conducted on 319 diagnosed cases of thyroid nodules referred to the Surgery Unit of Puls hospital, Tîrgu Mureș in the January 2014 – December 2015 period, who underwent fine-needle aspiration. Histological examination was considered to be the gold standard; therefore we compared the cytological diagnosis with the histological one.<bold>Results:</bold> Of the 319 cases, 289 (90.6%) were female and 30 (9.4%) male patients; 210 cases (69.3%) were interpreted as benign, 46 cases (15.2%) as follicular lesion of undetermined significance, 4 cases (1.3%) as suspect for malignancy, 1 case (0.3%) as malignant sampling, and 42 cases (13.9%) as unsatisfactory. We compared the results of fine-needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) with the corresponding histopathological results (49 in total). FNAC achieved a sensitivity of 76.47%, a specificity of 83.1%, a positive predictive value of 35.1%, a negative predictive value of 96.7%, a false positive rate of 16.9%, a false negative rate of 23%, and an overall accuracy of 82.3%.<bold>Conclusions:</bold> The results of our study demonstrate the accuracy of the FNA technique in the first-line diagnosis of thyroid nodules.</abstract>

Objective: To evaluate and demonstrate the accuracy of fine-needle aspiration (FNA) in thyroid lesions in our department and to highlight probable causes of errors leading to unsatisfactory sampling, which may depend on the characteristics of the nodule.Methods: This is a retrospective study conducted on 319 diagnosed cases of thyroid nodules referred to the Surgery Unit of Puls hospital, Tîrgu Mureș in the January 2014 – December 2015 period, who underwent fine-needle aspiration. Histological examination was considered to be the gold standard; therefore we compared the cytological diagnosis with the histological one.Results: Of the 319 cases, 289 (90.6%) were female and 30 (9.4%) male patients; 210 cases (69.3%) were interpreted as benign, 46 cases (15.2%) as follicular lesion of undetermined significance, 4 cases (1.3%) as suspect for malignancy, 1 case (0.3%) as malignant sampling, and 42 cases (13.9%) as unsatisfactory. We compared the results of fine-needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) with the corresponding histopathological results (49 in total). FNAC achieved a sensitivity of 76.47%, a specificity of 83.1%, a positive predictive value of 35.1%, a negative predictive value of 96.7%, a false positive rate of 16.9%, a false negative rate of 23%, and an overall accuracy of 82.3%.Conclusions: The results of our study demonstrate the accuracy of the FNA technique in the first-line diagnosis of thyroid nodules.

The Sensitivity and Specificity of Fine-Needle Aspiration in Thyroid Neoplasia

Journal of Interdisciplinary Medicine

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

{"article-title":"The Sensitivity and Specificity of Fine-Needle Aspiration in Thyroid Neoplasia"}

Objective: To evaluate and demonstrate the accuracy of fine-needle aspiration (FNA) in thyroid lesions in our department and to highlight probable causes of...

The Sensitivity and Specificity of Fine-Needle Aspiration in Thyroid Neoplasia

Published Online: Jul 10, 2017

Page range: 127 - 131

Received: Mar 28, 2017

Accepted: May 29, 2017

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jim-2017-0047

Keywords
FNA, thyroid cancer, sensitivity, specificity

© 2017 Rareș Georgescu et al., published by De Gruyter Open

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

The Sensitivity and Specificity of Fine-Needle Aspiration in Thyroid Neoplasia

Published Online: Jul 10, 2017

Page range: 127 - 131

Received: Mar 28, 2017

Accepted: May 29, 2017

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jim-2017-0047

KeywordsFNA, thyroid cancer, sensitivity, specificity

© 2017 Rareș Georgescu et al., published by De Gruyter Open

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.

Keywords
FNA, thyroid cancer, sensitivity, specificity