ABC Technique as a Novel Approach for Endometriosis Surgery

Endometriosis is a chronic disease defined as existence of endometrium like lesions outside of the uterine cavity. The diagnosis is based on examination of lesions under microscope and capturing endometrial gland and stroma. The prevalence of endometriosis upon women on their reproductive ages, all over the world is at least 10%. This prevalence depends on surgically proven lesions that are excised, according to the this the real prevalence is still unknown because of underdiagnosis and being unable to capture endometriotic lesions.

Endometriosis is usually described as having three subtypes, which are peritoneal, ovarian endometriomas and deep infiltrative endometriosis (DIE). Peritoneal endometriosis is the most undiagnosed type according to lack of diagnostic tests and being unrecognizable on imaging modalities while ovarian endometriomas and deep infiltrative endometriosis lesions can be realized by ultrasound or MRI imaging. Also, these three subtypes are mostly existing together and even with uterine endometriosis which is named as adenomyosis. Considering the difficulties of capturing an endometriotic lesion most of the surgeries done for deep endometriosis or ovarian endometriomas usually fail upon insufficient excision of the disease.

The main presentations of endometriosis are pain and infertility. Whether it can be thought the most devastating anatomical lesion may cause more pain, the pain of endometriosis is usually unrelated with the characteristics of pathology or severity of the disease. Therefore, a small lesion even not visible to the naked eye may cause more pain than a large DIE nodule. This knowledge arises the importance of threating all lesions on a symptomatic patient with pain.

The mostly used surgical technique to diagnose and treat endometriosis is laparoscopic surgery. Under laparoscopic scope endometriotic lesions can bee seen in black, red, white colors and as flat or polypoid. Human eye can see wave lengths between 400-700 nm. And it is not always easy to visualize all pathologies even with the 4 to 40 times magnification of usual laparoscopic scopes. Human vision under white-light reflection cannot easily discriminate different tissue types. Making color contrasts make objects easy to be catch by human eye.

In our novel technique for endometriosis surgery we used methylene blue for its natural blue color to make endometriotic lesions more visible and to filter red, yellow and white colors reflecting from peritoneal surface.