Abstract
Thyroid scintigraphy, ultrasonography and soft rentgenography have been used conventionally for the evaluation of thyroid nodules. These diagnostic procedures, however, are often inaccurate for a small portion of malignant tumors. Therefore the diagnostic accuracy of fine-needle aspiration biopsy for cytology (FNABC) was assessed in 204 patients with nodular thyroid disease. Seventy-two out of the 204 patients were confirmed histologically as malignant thyroid nodules. In this group the true positive rate was 66.7% with only one folse-positive case. In papillary carcinoma it was 74.1% and 33.3% in follicular carcinoma. There was a correration between the tumor size and true positive rate in FNABC. The larger the tumors were, the higher the true positive rate became. In papillary carcinoma 15 out of 58 cases were false-negative. Main reason was bad sampling of the smear. In follicular carcinoma 8 out of 12 cases were false-negative. It might be difficult for FNABC to make a precise diagnosis of follicular carcinoma, being a future theme to improve it. FNABC was a easy, safe and reliable method in treating the patients with thyroid nodules.
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