Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Role of Intraoperative Frozen Section if Suspicious for Papillary Thyroid Cancer

Introduction: Papillary thyroid carcinoma (PTC), the most prevalent kind of well-differentiated malignant tumorof the thyroid.Aim of work: Reviewing frozen section’s involvement in patients with suspected papillary thyroid cancer (accuracy,sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value) as well as its impact on surgicaloutcomes and any postoperative problems was the aim of the current study.Patients and methods: Fifteen research articles were included in the current study after around 400 publicationswere found and those that did not meet the inclusion criteria were excluded. The 15 studies that made upour meta-analysis comprised 2659 patients who had intraoperative frozen sections following either a completethyroidectomy or a lobectomy. Of these, 577 instances were found to be benign based on intraoperative frozensections, whereas 2011 cases involved the discovery of malignancy.Results: Accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV), and negative predictive value (NPV) offrozen section in suspicious papillary thyroid carcinoma were all examined in the current meta-analysis study. Theresults showed that the use of frozen section intraoperatively in suspicious papillary thyroid cancer cases was supportedby accuracy of 91.38%, sensitivity of 90.45%, specificity of 99.57%, PPV of 99.95%, and NPV of 54.39%.Conclusion: The current analysis shows that the rate of false negative frozen sections is 7.4%, which supportsthe usage of frozen sections and is consistent with previous research.