To Evaluate Diagnostic Utility of FNAC for Palpable Thyroid Lesion and Comparison with Ultrasound and Thyroid Profile

To study the advantage of FNAC over ultrasound finding in thyroid lumps by comparing the diagnostic accuracy in term of sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values considering the histopathological diagnosis of thyroidectomy specimen(either total/subtotal/partial) specimen as the gold standard.

A prospective study of 64 patients with thyroid lump was conducted in the Department of Pathology of tertiary care teaching hospital of northern part of India. All the patients with palpable thyroid lump were randomly selected, irrespective of their age, religion, marital status, occupation or social status for FNAC and USG thyroid following a thorough clinical check-up during the period of January 2015 to February 2016 were included. All of these patients were followed with thyroidectomy with subsequent histopathological findings.

Results of FNAC thyroid and USG Thyroid were reported according to standard reporting format And then their results were compared with each other in term of sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values considering the histopathological diagnosis of thyroidectomy specimen (either total/subtotal/partial) specimen as the gold standard. Sensitivity of FNAC was 92.1875 & Sensitivity of USG was 85.9375; Specificity of FNAC in diagnosing malignant lesion was 100%. Specificity of USG in diagnosing malignant lesion was 100%; Positive Predictive Value for FNAC was 100%; Positive Predictive value for USGwas 100%; Negative Predictive Value for FNAC was 94.545% and Negative Predictive Value for USG was 90.909%.

In the present study, we had concluded that FNACis found to be the most useful line of investigation than other investigations like ultrasonography (USG), and thyroid function test (TFT).