The preciseness in diagnosing thyroid malignant nodules using shear-wave elastography

Abstract

Our study aimed to identify more accurate results about the diagnostic role of shear-wave elastography (SWE) for thyroid malignant nodules through a meta-analysis. Potential articles were searched in PubMed, Embase, and the Cochrane Library databases. Overall sensitivity and specificity with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) was used to represent the diagnostic accuracy of SWE. Summary receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was constructed to illustrate the results. In addition, χ2 and I2 tests were performed to assess heterogeneity. A value of p≤0.05 indicated significant heterogeneity. All the analysis was conducted in Meta-DiSc version 1.4 software. Twenty studies were included in the analysis. There were a total of 2,907 patients and 3,397 thyroid nodules included in the meta-analysis. Overall sensitivity and specificity were 0.68 (95% CI: 0.66–0.70) and 0.85 (95% CI: 0.84–0.87), respectively. The results showed the area under curve (AUC) was 0.9041, suggesting high accuracy of SWE for differentiating benign and malignant thyroid nodules. SWE showed high accuracy in identifying thyroid malignant nodules, suggesting it could serve as a diagnostic biomarker in thyroid nodules.