How to diagnose the benignity or malignancy of the mass?

When a patient comes to the hospital, for example, with a lump in the thyroid gland in the neck, the physician will usually ask about the medical history, “how long has it been found”, “is there any pain or discomfort”, etc., and then feel it by hand, that is, palpation, to understand the texture and mobility. There is also the prescription of auxiliary examinations such as ultrasonography; finally, the clinical diagnosis is made based on a combination of ultrasonography results, laboratory tests, medical history and physical examination features. How does a diagnostic ultrasonographer perform an ultrasound examination and determine whether a neck mass (thyroid nodule) is benign or malignant? Routinely, ultrasound examinations are generally performed in two-dimensional ultrasound, color flow ultrasound and pulsed Doppler ultrasound. In layman’s terms, 2D ultrasound is to observe the size, number, location, morphology, aspect ratio, boundary, internal echo, presence of calcification and posterior echo of the nodule; color flow ultrasound is to observe whether the nodule is rich or poor in blood supply, marginal or central, or mixed; Doppler ultrasound is to observe the peak flow rate and resistance index (RI) of the blood vessels. Based on the three examination modalities and medical history, the sonographer makes the ultrasound diagnosis of the nodule – benign, or with a high probability of malignancy, or with a difficult diagnosis of benign or malignant, and recommends follow-up. What about the increasing number of masses that do not have typical benign or malignant features and often cross over, making it difficult to make a definitive ultrasound diagnosis? Are there better techniques and diagnostic modalities to provide more information to differentiate and clarify. With the development of diagnostic ultrasound technology, flexible ultrasound, three-dimensional ultrasound and ultrasonography are becoming more and more sophisticated, providing more and more information for disease diagnosis, and sometimes more characteristic information to make the diagnosis clear. The most important thing for thyroid nodules is to provide information on the coronal surface, whether the edges are smooth or not, whether there are burrs, etc. Ultrasonography is the dynamic observation of the nodule’s The ultrasonography technique is to dynamically observe the perfusion of the nodule, whether it is “fast forward and fast backward”, “fast forward and slow backward”, “slow forward and fast backward”, etc., whether it is isoenhanced or weakly enhanced, and to make conclusions. In conclusion, the three conventional modalities, as well as newer modalities such as elasticity, 3D and contrast, provide more comprehensive information on all aspects of the mass, so that it can be diagnosed with individualized information. It has been reported in the literature that combining multiple modalities for ultrasound is more accurate than single modality and less modality examinations.