Shear Wave Elastography for Differentiation of Benign and Malignant Thyroid Nodules

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to assess the performance of shear wave elastography for identification of benign and malignant thyroid nodules using meta-analysis. PubMed, MEDLINE, Embase, the Cochrane Library, and the China National Knowledge Infrastructure were searched. Patients' clinical characteristics, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value were extracted. The diagnostic odds ratio and summary receiver operating characteristic curve were used to examine the accuracy of shear wave elastography. A meta-analysis was performed to evaluate the clinical utility of shear wave elastography for identification of benign and malignant thyroid nodules. The summary sensitivity and specificity for the diagnosis of malignant thyroid nodules by shear wave elastography were 0.84 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.76-0.90) and 0.90 (95% CI, 0.87-0.92), respectively. The pooled positive likelihood ratio was 7.39 (95% CI, 4.09-13.35), and the negative likelihood ratio was 0.20 (95% CI, 0.13-0.29). The summary diagnostic odds ratio was 41.35 (95% CI, 17.38-98.41), and the summary area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.92 (Q* = 0.8538). Shear wave elastography has high sensitivity and specificity in the evaluation of thyroid nodules and can potentially reduce unnecessary fine-needle aspiration biopsies.