Recent Advances in Ultrasound and Photoacoustic Analysis for Thyroid Cancer Diagnosis

Abstract Thyroid cancer is one of the most commonly diagnosed cancers worldwide, with a continuously increasing incidence rate in recent decades. Although ultrasonography, which is the current screening method in clinical workflows, has successfully triaged cancerous nodules for biopsy, overdiagnosis has also grown due to the relatively low specificity of the method. Studies are conducted to overcome this overdiagnosis issue by complementing ultrasonography with additional image‐based analysis techniques. This review presents an overview of the current advances in clinical trials using advanced ultrasound (US) and photoacoustic (PA) imaging techniques for thyroid nodules in humans. A summary of initial trials by Doppler US and US elastography to improve the classification accuracy of thyroid nodules is presented. Furthermore, recent PA techniques with multispectral analyses utilizing clinically available machines are explored. By amending the existing ultrasonography, the advanced US and PA techniques can enhance the triaging accuracy by analyzing both structural and functional information of thyroid nodules in vivo.