Learnability And Reproducibility Of ACR TI-RADS:A Postgraduate Freshmen Trained Study

ObjectivesTo evaluate the learnability of the American College of Radiology(ACR)Thyroid Imaging,Reporting and Data System(TI-RADS)for postgraduate freshmen and to assess the reproducibility of the guidelines.Materials and Methods(1)Trained study: Postgraduate freshmen were trained in stages.In each stage,3 postgraduate freshmen and 3 experts evaluated 50 randomly selected nodules according to ACR TI-RADS.The postgraduate freshmen’ results were compared with the results consulted by 3 experts.The major differences were identified as the focus of the training.The next stage of training was continually carried out in the same manner until the postgraduate freshmen’s diagnostic level approached or reached the level of expert.(2)Assessment of reproducibility: 3 months after completing the training,the 50 nodules of last stage were re-evaluated again to assess the reproducibility of ACR TI-RADS.ResultsAfter training,the diagnostic accuracies of postgraduate freshmen significantly increased from 60%,48% and 46% in Stage 1 to 80%,78% and 72% in Stage 4.The difference was significant(p values were 0.029,0.002 and 0.008,respectively).After training,the diagnostic accuracies of postgraduate freshmen were close to the experts(84%).And in the US features,postgraduate freshmen were well consistent with experts(substantial to almost perfect consistencies).In order to assess the reproducibility of postgraduate freshmen using ACR TI-RADS,we compared the evaluated results of Stage 4 between the first time and the second time 3 months later.the reproducibility had substantial to almost perfect consistency.ConclusionsACR TI-RADS was easy to master.The reproducibility of ACR TI-RADS was excellent.