ArticleEndocrine2018
Thyroid nodule ultrasound reports in routine clinical practice provide insufficient information to estimate risk of malignancy.
Article in Endocrine, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 7 papers.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed, 25 citations in OpenAlex.
- Evaluation of thyroid ultrasound reports' quality in the Community of Madrid, Spain.European thyroid journal · 2025Article
- Improvement in neck ultrasound report quality following the implementation of European Thyroid Association guidelines for postoperative cervical ultrasound for thyroid cancer follow-up, a prospective population study.European thyroid journal · 2023Article
- Improvement in thyroid ultrasound report quality with radiologists' adherence to 2015 ATA or 2017 TIRADS: a population study.European thyroid journal · 2022Article
- Malignancy risk of thyroid nodules: quality assessment of the thyroid ultrasound report.BMC medical imaging · 2022Article
- Thyroid Ultrasound Reports: Will the Thyroid Imaging, Reporting, and Data System Improve Natural Language Processing Capture of Critical Thyroid Nodule Features?The Journal of surgical research · 2020Article
- Contemporary Thyroid Nodule Evaluation and Management.The Journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism · 2020Review
- American College of Radiology Thyroid Imaging Reporting and Data System standardises reporting of thyroid ultrasounds.SA journal of radiology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
purposeUltrasonographic characteristics of thyroid nodules play an important role in estimating the risk of malignancy (ROM). Guidelines mandate all thyroid nodules be characterized by six key ultrasonographic features to estimate the ROM. Our objective was to evaluate how frequently these characteristics were identified by radiologists and the ensuing utility to estimate ROM.
methodsWe retrospectively reviewed 1930 consecutive diagnostic thyroid ultrasound reports from a large community radiology practice. A total of 1339 individual patients were found to have one or more thyroid nodules. Each report was analyzed for six key ultrasonographic features. A utility score (UtS) was calculated (range 0-6) with a single point given for a comment on each feature.
resultsOf the 1339 patients, 75% of the studies reported more than one nodule (mean number of nodules = 3.4). Mean maximal diameter of the largest nodule per patient = 1.8 cm. The mean UtS was 2.57. Nodule size did not influence the UtS.: Nodule <1 cm (UtS: 2.53), 1-2 cm (UtS: 2.68) and >2 cm (UtS: 2.49). We believe a UtS of four or greater is needed to confidently estimate ROM: we found this in 13.7% of reports.
conclusionsOur retrospective analysis of a large number of consecutive thyroid ultrasound reports in routine clinical practice suggests that the vast majority provide insufficient information to allow the clinician to risk stratify the nodules by estimating the ROM. This could lead to both over-diagnosis and over-treatment of benign/indolent thyroid lesions or under-diagnosis of clinically important thyroid cancers.
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