Diagnosis of Pelvic Endometriosis: a Preliminary Study on the Added Value of R2*MFGRE Sequence in MRI

This prospective study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the local hos-pital, and informed consent was obtained from all the patients in this study (3701027061515). All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of our institutional and national re-search committee and with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Study population One hundred and Sixty-five patients with suspected endometriosis underwent pelvic MRI with R2*MFGRE imaging from Decemberr 2017 to December 2023. Of those, One hundred and forty patients were submitted to surgical (either laparotomy or laparoscopy) treatment for endometriosis. The diagnosis was confirmed by pathology within one month after the initial MR exam. Additionally, 20 out of 160 patients were excluded from the study. Of these, 11 were due to non-surgical treatment, and the other 8 were due to prominent susceptibility artifacts caused by colonic overdistention, limiting the vis-ibility of the pelvis. Finally, One hundred patients were included in the study.

All 100 patients were aged ranging from 24 to 54 years, with an average age of 37.8 years. Their clinical symptoms included dysmenorrhea, bulging in the lower abdomen or anus, heavy menstrual bleeding, dyspareunia, and infertility. Some of these patients had multiple symptoms