Endocrine Abstracts

Utlrasonography is now a crucial part of diagnosis and the follow-up of thyroid cancers as well as other thyroid disorders. If you are an endocrinologist of the age 40 or below and if you still do not perform ultrasonography by yourself, we believe you have an important skill to learn, which will guide you through out your thyroid practice and totally change your vision to thyroid disorders.

We hereby discuss the importance of thyroid ultrasonography for the diagnosis and follow up of thyroid malignancy under three headings.

(1) Picking up the high risk cases among a large group of patients with nodular thyroid disorders.

(2) Preoperatively, to define the operation strategy for the FNAC(+) patients.

(3) Postoperative management of differentiated and medullary thyroid cancer patients.

If one can use ultrasonography for these three headings in a given thyroid cancer patients, we believe that the outcome of the patient will be improved to a great extend.