A Study of Association between Preoperative Fine Needle Aspiration Cytology and Post-Operative Histopathological Examination of Solitary Thyroid Nodule among Patients Attending North Bengal Medical College and Hospital, Siliguri

BACKGROUND FNAC (Fine Needle Aspiration Cytology) is an essential tool in the preoperative diagnosis and preoperative planning for surgery of solitary thyroid nodules. It is a cost effective procedure that provides specific diagnosis rapidly with minimal complication. The purpose of the study was to evaluate the accuracy of Fine Needle Aspiration Cytology as a diagnostic tool in detecting malignancy in case of solitary thyroid nodule by correlating the preoperative fine needle aspiration cytology (USG Guided) findings with post-operative histopathology findings of the excised specimen in a sub Himalayan tertiary medical college & hospital. METHODS It was a cross sectional hospital based study conducted on 30 patients in the period from April 2015 to March 2016 after acceptance from West Bengal University of Health Sciences and approval from ethical committee. All admitted patients having solitary thyroid nodule (confirmed clinically & ultrasonographically), biochemically euthyroid and giving consent for surgery were included in this study. Patients who are medically unfit for surgery, biochemically hypo- or hyper-thyroid and not giving consent for surgery were excluded from the study. RESULTS The sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, positive predictive value and negative predictive value of FNAC for diagnosis of neoplastic solitary thyroid nodule were 75%, 94.44%, 86.67%, 90% and 85%. Commonest malignancy detected was papillary carcinoma in 9 patients. CONCLUSIONS It is evident from our study that USG guided FNAC should be regarded as the investigation of choice and first line investigation in evaluation of cases with solitary thyroid nodule due to its simplicity, high diagnostic accuracy, easy to perform procedure and absence of significant complications.