Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Medicine - Department of Radio-diagnosis

Endometriosis is the most common cause of chronic pelvic pain in reproductive age women. It affects approximately 10% of women of the reproductive age. Diagnostic performance values of MRI wereevaluated with a conventional MR protocol; T1, T1FS and T2 WI, and with diffusion weighted and T2* weighted sequences. Surgery and histopathologic examination are the only confirmatory methods for the lesions, thus our quantitative studies included only the surgically confirmed lesions. 80.7% of the endometriosis lesions showed restricted diffusion on DWI, and 96.1% of the endometriosis lesions had signal losses on the T2 star weighted sequence related to hemorrhagic character whereas only 65.4% of the lesions had T1W hyperintense signals and T2 Shading.Diagnostic performance of the MRI examination was improved by the use of the diffusion sequence and more improved by the T2* sequence, compared to the conventional MR protocol (Se=96.12 and Spe=85.7 in T2* weighted images, and Se=80.7 and Spe=71.4 in DWI, Se=80.7 and Spe=71.4 in conventional MRI. P value for conventional MRI was 0.1 which is considered not statistically significantly (p <0.05). P-value for DWI was 0.016, which is considered statistically significantly (p<0.05). P-value for T2*WI was 0.001, which isconsidered statistically significantly (p <0.05).Thus, DWI and T2* significantly improve the diagnostic accuracy of MRI by allowing the detection of hemorrhagic character of endometriotic lesions

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