Diagnostic Performance and Imaging Features of Thyroid Nodular Lesions on 1.5T MRI

CHEN Xiaofei; LI Yuyong; YI He; WANG Chuanmo; WANG Wei

doi:10.3969/j.issn.2095-3097.2024.06.002

Abstract：Objective To evaluate the diagnostic efficacy of1.5T MRI in the diagnosis of thyroid nodular lesions and to analyze its MRI imaging characteristics.Methods A total of120 patients with thyroid nodular lesions treated in our hospi-tal from January 2022 to January 2024 were selected as the study subjects.Patients were divided into benign thyroid nodule (BTN) group with 72 cases and thyroid cancer (TC) group with 48 cases based on pathological examination results.The MRI image features,quantitative parameters,and dynamic contrast-enhanced time-signal intensity curves (TIC) types of the two groups were compared.The diagnostic efficacy was assessed using pathological examination results as the gold standard.Re-sults The proportion of malignant nodules with characteristics such as larger lesion size,irregular shape,increased vascular shadows,blurred margins,spiculated signs,and lymph node enlargement was significantly higher than that of benign nodules,with statistically significant differences (P<0.05).The TIC images of benign nodules were mainly of the washout type (Type Ⅲ),while those of malignant nodules were mainly of the plateau type (Type Ⅱ),with statistically significant differences be-tween the two groups (P<0.05).MRI quantitative parameter analysis showed that the ADC values,Ktrans,and Kep of malig-nant nodules were significantly lower than those of benign nodules,while Ve was significantly higher.The sensitivity of MRI in diagnosing benign and malignant thyroid nodules was 93.8％,the specificity was 94.4％,the Youden index was 0.882,and the AUC of the ROC curve was0.941.Conclusion 1.5T MRI has a high diagnostic efficacy in the diagnosis of thyroid nod-ular lesions,and its imaging features are of great value in distinguishing between benign and malignant nodules.