Abstract
In order to provide clinical references for the RFA procedure and to study the pivotal factors affecting the recovery time of radiofrequency ablation (RFA) in patients with papillary thyroid microcarcinoma (PTMC), 176 patients with low-risk intrathyroidal PTMC were included in this research. We randomly divided the whole cohort into training and test groups at a ratio of 7:3. The two-sample t-test was used to detect differences between the two groups. Least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression was used to select the best predictor variables for predicting the status of RFA zone. Multiple test methods were used to ensure the scientific nature and accuracy of the Cox proportional hazards model. We tested the performance for the parameters and revealed the best cut-off value of each variable by the ROC curve and log-rank tests. The results showed patients aged above 49 years old, with RFA energy above 2800 J, the average diameter of the original tumour above 0.6 cm, or the average diameter of ablation zone at 1 month after RFA above 1.1 cm are risk factors for RFA zone delayed healing.