Purpose: The purpose of our study was to prospectively evaluate the diagnostic performance of the vascular index (VI, defined as the ratio of Doppler signal pixels to pixels in the total lesion) measured via Smart 3-D superb microvascular imaging (SMI) for breast lesions. Patients and methods: Two hundred and thirty-two consecutive patients with 236 breast lesions referred for biopsy at Peking Union Medical College Hospital were enrolled in the study from December 2016 to November 2017. Sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), negative predictive value (NPV) and accuracy of VI were calculated with histopathologic results as the reference standard. Results: Of the 236 breast lesions, 121 were malignant and 115 were benign. The mean VI was significantly higher in malignant lesions (9.7±8.2) than that in benign ones (3.4±3.3) ( P <0.0001). Sensitivity, specificity, PPV, NPV and accuracy of VI (4.0 as the threshold) were respectively: 76.0%, 66.1%, 70.2%, 72.4% and 71.2% ( P <0.05). Conclusion: Smart three-dimensional (3-D) SMI is a noninvasive tool using two-dimensional (2-D) scanning to generate 3-D vascular architecture with a high-resolution image of micro-vessels. This can be used as a qualitative guide to identify the optimal 2-D SMI plane with the most abundant vasculature to guide VI quantitative measurements of breast lesions. Smart 3-D SMI may potentially serve as a noninvasive tool to accurately characterize benign versus malignant breast lesions.

ObjectiveIt remains inconclusive whether Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (HT) predisposes patients to the development of papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC). We conducted a meta-analysis of the available data to address this question.ResultsTwenty-seven eligible studies were selected, including 18 archival thyroidectomy studies, 6 fine-needle aspiration (FNA) studies, and 3 selective FNA or thyroidectomy studies. A total of 76,281 patients, including 12,476 cases of thyroid cancer, were included in these studies. The mean rate of PTC among patients with HT ranged from 1.12% (selective FNA or thyroidectomy studies) to 40.11% (thyroidectomy studies). All three types of studies supported the correlation between HT and PTC. The overall pooled odds ratio (OR) of the PTC risk for HT (HT versus non-HT) was 2.12 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.78-2.52).MethodsWe searched all relevant published studies using the citation databases PubMed and Embase. The ORs and corresponding 95% CIs were calculated by the random-effects model for the association between HT and PTC.ConclusionsOur meta-analysis confirmed that HT predisposed patients to the development of PTC.

Intranodular vascularity on SMI is useful for determining thyroid carcinoma. Furthermore, a combination of SMI and grayscale features performs better than any single sonographic feature alone.