The rising prevalence of thyroid nodules is straining limited cytopathology resources, resulting in excessive overdiagnosis and overtreatment with significant patient and healthcare consequences. To address this, AI-TFNA is developed, a robust artificial intelligence platform leveraging extensive clinical data to enhance diagnostic accuracy and clinical efficiency. A total of 20,803 thyroid samples are collected from seven medical centers across different regions in China. Of these, 4,421 thyroid fine-needle aspiration (TFNA) samples from three hospitals are used to train AI-TFNA, ensuring strong generalizability across diverse clinical settings. For the internal validation, AI-TFNA demonstrates exceptional performance: the overall accuracy of TBS I is 93.27%, the sensitivity of TBS V and TBS VI reaches 85.37% and 83.78%, while the specificity of TBS II is 97.13%. Consistent results are observed in an external cohort of 2,153 samples, demonstrating robust generalizability. The incorporation of BRAF mutation data into AI-TFNA and the development of a multi-modal model further improve precision by significantly improving the differentiation between benign and malignant thyroid nodules. Image Appearance Migration (IAM) is an innovative technique that substantially improves cross-institutional model generalizability, increasing AI-TFNA sensitivity by 1.90% and specificity by 8.12%. AI-TFNA offers rapid, reliable decision support, advancing thyroid nodule diagnostics.
Keywords: artificial intelligence; cytopathological diagnosis; fine needle aspiration cytology (FNAC); thyroid nodules; whole‐slide image (WSI).
© 2025 The Author(s). Advanced Science published by Wiley‐VCH GmbH.