Diagnostic Importance of Fine Needle Non-aspiration and Fine Needle Aspiration Cytology in Thyroid Lesions

Introduction: Fine needle aspiration cytology (FNAC) is the routine, minimal invasive technique, and well-established baseline investigation used to diagnose the nodular thyroid lesion. The main disadvantages were an inadequate specimen or the specimen obtained was blood. To avoid these problems, a new method called as fine needle non-aspiration cytology is performed nowadays instead of FNAC. Aim: To find the diagnostic importance of fine needle non-aspiration and FNAC in thyroid lesions. Materials and Methods: This was a diagnostic study done at Melmaruvathur Adhiparashakthi Medical College and Hospital in the Department of Surgery from March 2013 to January 2015. About 55 patients who presented with a thyroid swelling were subjected to fine-needle aspiration (FNA) and fine needle cytology (FNC) technique and underwent thyroidectomy. The slides were assessed according to Mair et al. scoring system and compared with the histopathology reports. Finally, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value were calculated. Results: In this study, the majority of the patients were 30-39 years (36.36%) of age. Females comprised about 54.55% of the study group. The diagnostic performance of FNC and FNA technique indicated that FNC yielded more diagnostically superior case than FNA. However, diagnostically adequate cases were more with FNA. On the whole, the sensitivity for the FNC and FNA were 87.04% and 90.74%. The negative predictive value for both FNC and FNA was 12.5% and 16.67%. Conclusion: Both the techniques have similar results, hence, can be used in tandem. However, both the techniques should be used in different places. In high cellular lesions, FNC should be the first choice and in less cellular lesions FNAC should be preferred. But on the whole, FNAC was found to be diagnostically adequate and superior than FNC.