Liu J, et al. - The significance of ultrasound-based shear wave elastography (SWE) was examined by researchers in patients with diffuse thyroid disease (DTD) by analyzing the thyroid stiffness. It was reported that the area under the receiver operating characteristic (AUROC) of SWE for differentiating chronic autoimmune thyroiditis (CAT) from Graves' disease (GD) and subacute thyroiditis (SAT) were 0.549 and 0.989, respectively. Yielded results exhibited that SWE proved to be useful in the diagnosis of DTD. In order to distinguish GD from SAT, SWE was found to be superior to the fT3/fT4 ratio. However, SWE was unsuitable for differentiating CAT from GD. Nonetheless, SWE was discovered to be unsuitable for such a differentiation.