GUIDELINE IMPLEMENTATION ON FINE-NEEDLE ASPIRATION FOR THYROID NODULES: FOCUSING ON MICRONODULES

OBJECTIVE We investigated patients who were referred to our institution after FNA was performed at outside clinics to evaluate how many nodules satisfying the FNA indications of the K-TIRADS, and to compare the number of thyroid nodules that satisfy the FNA indications of the ACR TIRADS and ATA guideline. MATERIALS AND METHODS Between January 2018 to December 2018, 2,628 patients were included in our study. The included patients were those ones referred for thyroid surgery after having a suspicious thyroid nodule. We retrospectively applied the three guidelines to each thyroid nodule and determined whether each nodule satisfied the FNA indications. We compared the proportion of nodules satisfying the FNA indications of each guideline using the generalized linear model with the generalized estimating equation. RESULTS The median size of 2,628 thyroid nodules was 0.9cm (range 0.2-9.5cm). We found that FNA was not indicated for 54.1%, 47.7%, and 19.1% of nodules and 87.3%, 99.0%, and 97.8% among them were micronodules (