Quantitative crawling wave sonoelastography of benign and malignant thyroid nodules

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Oncology
• Biophysics

Background:

• Thyroid nodules are common, requiring accurate differentiation between benign and malignant types.
• Current diagnostic methods for thyroid nodules have limitations.
• Sonoelastography offers a non-invasive approach to assess tissue stiffness.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate crawling wave elastography for quantitative measurement of thyroid tissue shear velocity.
• To determine if this technique can differentiate benign from malignant thyroid nodules.

Main Methods:

• Ex vivo imaging of 20 fresh thyroid specimens using crawling wave sonoelastography.
• Calculation of shear velocity (SV) and contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) for 44 regions of interest.
• Correlation of SV and CNR values with histological diagnoses.

Main Results:

• Papillary thyroid carcinoma (n=10) showed significantly higher SV (2.45 m/s) and CNR (5.29) than benign nodules (n=22, SV=1.90 m/s, CNR=-0.41).
• Contrast-to-noise ratio achieved 100% sensitivity and 90.9% specificity for differentiating papillary thyroid carcinoma.
• Shear velocity achieved 83.3% sensitivity and 72.7% specificity.

Conclusions:

• Crawling wave sonoelastography provides quantitative shear velocity measurements of thyroid nodules.
• This technique effectively depicts tissue elastic properties.
• Both shear velocity and contrast-to-noise ratio can differentiate benign nodules from papillary thyroid carcinoma with high accuracy.