Papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC) spreads to regional lymph nodes frequently, but rarely causes distant metastases. PTC involves metastasis to cervical lymph nodes in 30 - 80% of patients, and recent studies have revealed that regional lymph node metastasis has an adverse prognostic impact on survival, especially in older patients ( ≥ 45 years). PTC recur most frequently at the cervical lymph nodes and locoregional recurrences are reported in up to 31% of patients. Such high rates of recurrence suggests that many patients have lymph node...

Patient -75 patients with PTC with 93 enlarged cervical lymph nodes underwent conventional neck ultrasonography and SWE for preoperative or postoperative evaluation of cervical lymph nodes between May 2011 and December 2012. -Lymph nodes were considered suspicious when one of the suspicious ultrasound findings (loss of fatty hilum, calcifications, cystic change, hyperechogenicity, and round shape) was present. -SWE was performed at lymph nodes showing suspicious US features before US-FNAB (n=22), preoperative lymph node marking (n=46) or staging US (n=25) for surgery. -Of 93 lymph nodes,...

Correlation of SWE and pathologic results of lymph nodes -51 (60.7%) lymph nodes were metastatic and 33 (39.3 %) lymph nodes were benign. -SWE EI according to the pathologic diagnosis was listed in table 1. -Emean, Emin, Emax and Emean-m were significantly higher in metastatic lymph nodes than in benign lymph nodes (table1, P < 0.001). Correlation of SWE and pathologic results of lymph nodes -Diagnostic performances for predicting metastatic LNs using BUS, SWE EI alone and SWE EI combined with BUS are listed in...

The presence of metastatic LNs in patients of PTC is an independent risk factor of local tumor recurrence, which can be more life threatening than the original tumor. So, the exact assessment of nodal status is essential in preoperative assessment of PTC. There have been some studies investigating what nodal characteristics relate to risk of nodal recurrence [1-9, 26-29] and they reported that nodal size, number of positive nodes, and the presence of extranodal spread were importantly related to the main nodal prognostic parameter of...

Woo Sang Jung MD, Department of Radiology, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Gangnam Severance Hospital, Seoul, South Korea; [email protected] Jeong-Ah Kim MD, Department of Radiology, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Gangnam Severance Hospital, Seoul, South Korea; [email protected] Eun Ju Son MD, Department of Radiology, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Gangnam Severance Hospital, Seoul, South Korea; [email protected] Ji Hyun Youk MD, Department of Radiology, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Gangnam Severance Hospital, Seoul, South Korea; [email protected] Cheong Soo Park MD, Department of Radiology, Yonsei University College...

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