Synoptic pathology reporting for thyroid cancer: a review and institutional experience.

Thyroid cancer surgical pathology reports contain information that is critical for diagnosis, determining completeness of resection, staging and guiding postoperative management. Traditional narrative pathology reporting is prone to errors and omissions with variability in content and completeness. The objective of this review was to evaluate the impact of synoptic reporting on thyroid cancer pathology reporting. Our institutional study of pathology reporting of differentiated thyroid cancers at a Canadian tertiary care institution relative to the College of American Pathologists checklists is also presented and critically evaluates deficiencies in the narrative pathology reporting format.