Diagnosis
For a correct diagnosis of endometriosis, physical examination and medical history are useful, but not sufficient. For confirmation, in fact, doctors must resort to transvaginal ultrasound and, in some cases, also to surgical procedures with diagnostic purposes, such as laparoscopy or laparotomy.
- Transvaginal ultrasound: it is a normal ultrasound examination, during which the doctor introduces the ultrasound probe inside the vagina, to observe the pelvic organs in detail.
The sensitivity and specificity of transvaginal ultrasound are very high and provide clear images of the health of the observed anatomical structures. - Laparoscopy and laparotomy: surgical interventions of a certain delicacy, offer, depending on the circumstances, the possibility of taking portions of suspicious tissue to be analyzed in the laboratory (biopsy).
