Table 1.

Details of selected studies.

Study name	Country	Objective of study	Study type	Reference standard	Number of patients (no of casesa)
Lyshchik 2005	Belarus	To prospectively analyze the accuracy of various diagnostic criteria for cancer in solid thyroid nodules in children on the basis of gray-scale and power Doppler ultrasonographic findings.	Prospective study	Histopathology or FNA with follow-up	103 (103)
Corrias 2008	Italy	To investigate the association between juvenile autoimmune thyroiditis (JAT) and thyroid cancer in pediatric patients	Retrospective study	Histopathology or FNA with follow-up	115 (48)
Roy 2011	USA	To investigate clinical factors that may predict malignancy in pediatric thyroid nodules	Retrospective study	Histopathology	207 (72)
Saavedra 2011	Canada	To assess whether the presence of criteria for malignancy on the initial thyroid ultrasonography was helpful in diagnosing thyroid cancer even when a fine-needle aspiration biopsy (FNAB) suggests a benign lesion	Retrospective study	Histopathology	35 (21)
Goldfarb 2012	USA	To determine whether the preoperative clinic-based ultrasound (CBUS) characteristics of pediatric thyroid nodules were able to help further guide management and treatment	Retrospective study	Histopathology	50 (50)
Mussa 2015	Italy	To evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of clinical, laboratory, and ultrasound imaging characteristics of thyroid nodules in assessing the likelihood of malignancy	Retrospective study	Histopathology or FNA with follow-up	184 (129)
Papendieck 2015	Argentina	To highlight the findings of each diagnostic tool likely to differentiate benign from malignant thyroid nodules in a large cohort of pediatric patients	Prospective study	Histopathology or FNA with follow-up	75 (75)
Canfarotta 2017	USA	To evaluate the clinical utility of a modified pediatric McGill Thyroid Nodule Score (MTNS) with children and adolescents	Retrospective review	Histopathology	46 (46)
Lim-Dunham 2017	USA	To evaluate the diagnostic performance of pediatric thyroid nodule risk stratification for predicting malignancy when applying the ultrasound criteria recommended	Retrospective study	Histopathology or FNA with follow-up	33 (33)
Hammond 2017	USA	To evaluate the risk of thyroid cancer in incidental thyroid nodules discovered on CT in patients with a history of pediatric cancer	Retrospective review	Histopathology	20 (6)
Richman 2018	USA	To determine the relationship between demographic and sonographic characteristics of thyroid nodules and malignancy in a pediatric population	Retrospective study	Histopathology or FNA with follow-up	314 (314)
Uner 2019	Turkey	To define the diagnostic power of the TI-RADS risk stratification method in pediatric thyroid nodules.	Retrospective study	Histopathology or FNA with follow-up	64 (64)
Lim-Dunham 2019	USA	To assess the diagnostic performance of the American College of Radiology (ACR) Thyroid Imaging Reporting and Data System (TIRADS) for malignancy risk in pediatric thyroid nodules	Retrospective study	Histopathology or FNA with follow-up	62 (62)
Suh 2020	Korea	To identify predictive factors of thyroid cancer	Retrospective study	Histopathology or FNA with follow-up	275 (145)

^aNumber of patients refers to the whole population included in the study, whereas number of cases refers to the patients finally included in the analysis.