One of the major risks of endocrine surgery is recurrent nerve palsy (RNP), leading to vocal folds (VF) immobility. It happens in 5% of cases, leading to high morbidity: dysphonia, aspirations, impossibility to work. Guidelines recommend to systematically perform a nasofibroscopy before and after surgery to check vocal fold mobility. However, due to the decreasing number of specialists, the cost of decontamination, and discomfort of this procedure, these guidelines are insufficiently followed. Transcutaneous Laryngeal Ultrasonography (TLU) appears a good alternative to nasofibroscopy in evaluating VF mobility, as assessed by the recent flourishing literature. Our team is a leader in this research by having developed a dedicated software, which provides objective measures of VF mobility. The aim of the present protocol is to validate the power of TLU for the diagnosis of RNP on a large cohort of patients operated on endocrine surgery. It is a prospective multicentric study that will blindly compare TLU and nasofibroscopy, the latter being the gold standard. TLU is cost effective and painless; its learning curve is fast. If validated, it may be offered as a good alternative to nasofibroscopy in RNP detection and prognosis.
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Diagnostic performance associated with the postoperative quantitative TLU (i.e. measured by asymmetry in vocal cord mobility obtained with our dedicated software of image analysis) for the diagnostic of postoperative recurrent nerve palsy (RNP).
Timeframe: Between Day 1(the day after the surgery) and Day 15