The 125I thyroid scan: clinicopathologic correlation

For a 3built12 year period during which 125I was used as the routine agent for thyroid imaging, 95 cases of thyroid disease were reviewed in which a tissue diagnosis was obtained. The scan findings were usually distinctive in the cases of diffuse hyperplasia, but were of little help in separating the carcinomas from the nodular goiters or adenomas. This was true even when attention was confined to those cases presenting as nontoxic solitary or multiple nodules with no clinical evidence of malignancy. These results fall within the spectrum of results reported using 131I, and the two agents are probably of approximately equal value when used with commercially available scanners. The 125I scan showed less accuracy in separating multinodular from uninodular glands than that reported using 99mTcO4, but in our series carcinoma was as frequent in glands which contained multiple nodules on pathologic examination as in glands with solitary nodules.