A decision support system for assisting fine needle aspiration diagnosis of thyroid malignancy.

Objective: To assist diagnosis of thyroid malignancy, implementing a decision support system (DSS) using fine needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) data.

Study Design: The set of 2,035 thyroid smears contained 1,886 smears of nonmalignancy (class 1) and 150 smears of malignancy (class 2) verified histologically. For each smear, 67 medical features were considered by the expert, forming 2,036 feature vectors, which were fed into a DSS for discriminating between malignant and nonmalignant smears.