Quantitative indicators of sonographic image of thyroid gland and their relation to antithyroid antibodies in Hashimoto's lymphocytic thyroiditis.

Sonography is a widely used non-invasive diagnostic tool and its main advantage is low cost in comparison with other diagnostic methods such as immunological analyses. In this work it is presented the relation between a sonographic image of thyroid gland and an immunological status of the patients with Hashimoto's lymphocytic thyroiditis (chronic inflammation of the thyroid gland). The results, evaluated on a set of 740 B-mode sonographic images from 37 subjects, show that raw values of individual image pixels in sonogram of thyroid gland with presence and without presence of anti-thyroid antibodies are significantly different (means 31.87 and 44.56; standard deviations 8.6 and 11.82; t = 3.4; p = 0.0017) and that they can be used for the prediction of presence of anti-thyreoglobulin and anti-thyreoperoxidasis antibodies. This result suggests the possibility to use this method in clinical diagnostic process for reducing the costs. Also the correlation between the image features and the level of antibodies was examined. The highest correlation was found for inverse difference moment and the level of anti-thyreoperoxidasis (coefficient of determination 0.43).