Study of Fine-Needle Aspiration Biopsy and Metabolic Biomarkers for Thyroid Cancer Diagnosis

Thyroid nodules are the most common disease of the endocrine system. With neck palpation and ultrasonography, there are nearly 50% of the patients will be diagnosed. However, the incidence of thyroid cancer is very low, most of thyroid nodule is benign. For the diagnosis of benign nodules, the accuracy is nearly 98.3%, for malignancy and suspicious malignancy group the accuracy is up to100%. But in the group of "indeterminate" which may account for 36% of the cases, the efficiency of FNAB is limited. In general, the negative and positive predictive values are approaching 100% respectively. It is very important to identify the property of thyroid nodules for the treatment options. As a gold standard, Fine-Needle Aspiration Biopsy (FNAB) has become widely used in recent years. In this paper, 176 cases undergone FNAB have been analyzed statistically. Then, the relationship among the specimen characteristics and FNAB identification results has been discussed. In addition, we have studied a NMR spectroscopy based approach presuming that metabolic variations will pre-empt the development of morphologic modifications associated with malignancy. And the efficiency of determining the malignant tumors by using metabolic biomarkers and FNAB has been compared.