Current Insights and Future Advances in Endometriosis Diagnostics

Michèle Cioffi, María Teresa
In: Endometriosis - Basic Concepts and Current Research Trends · 2012 · doi:10.5772/30452 · W1507341320
Review OA: hybrid CC0
🔓 Open OA copy Full text JSON View on OpenAlex View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated summary by gemini-2.5-flash-lite, 2026-06-07 ⓘ

This review discusses the current understanding and future directions for diagnosing endometriosis, a benign gynecological condition characterized by ectopic endometrial tissue causing pain and infertility.

One-sentence paraphrase of the abstract; not a substitute for reading it. No clinical advice. How this works

⚙ AI-generated deep summary by qwen3.7-flash, 2026-10-27 · read from full text ⓘ

This chapter reviews the current state of diagnostic methods for endometriosis, highlighting that laparoscopic surgery with histological confirmation remains the gold standard despite its invasive nature. It examines various non-invasive and minimally invasive techniques, including imaging modalities like ultrasound and MRI, as well as biomarker analysis, noting that none have yet achieved sufficient sensitivity and specificity to replace surgical diagnosis. The authors discuss emerging technologies and potential future advances aimed at improving early detection and reducing the diagnostic delay associated with the disease. This paper is centrally about endometriosis — specifically focusing on the evolution and limitations of diagnostic tools for the condition.

Read from the paper's body, not the abstract. Not a substitute for reading the paper. No clinical advice. How this works

Abstract

Endometriosis is a benign gynaecological disease characterized by the presence of endometrial glands and stroma outside the uterine cavity. This condition is mainly found in women of reproductive age, from all ethnic and social groups and it is associated with pelvic pain and infertility. Endometriosis is typically present in the pelvis such as on the ovaries and pelvic peritoneum, but may also involve the bowel, ureter or bladder. It regresses after menopause or ovariectomy, suggesting it could depend on the production and metabolism of sex steroids: high concentrations of estrogens were found in the endometriotic lesions, which grow and regress in an oestrogen-dependent way. Nevertheless, the pathogenesis and the molecular mechanism that underlie the development of endometriosis have troubled the investigators through many years, remaining an enigma. The disease is widely accepted to result from the ectopic implantation of refluxed menstrual tissues. In addition, immunologic changes, environmental, hormonal and genetic factors contribute to the multifactorial etiology of endometriosis.
Full text 531 characters · extracted from oa-doi-fallback · click to expand
Open access Submitted: 18 March 2011 Published: 09 May 2012 DOI: 10.5772/30452 From the Edited Volume Edited by Koel Chaudhury and Baidyanath Chakravarty Submitted: 18 March 2011 Published: 09 May 2012 © 2012 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Discover 2026 Nobel Laureate Francis Halzen’s chapter on IntechOpen >

Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

⚙ Ask this paper AI returns verbatim quotes from the full text · source: oa-doi-fallback ⓘ

Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works

Condition tags

endometriosisinfertility

Citation neighborhood

Papers in the corpus that this work cites (lower rings, blue) and that cite this one (upper rings, green). Dot size scales with the paper's in-corpus citation count — bigger dot = more influential within the endo/adeno field. Click a dot to open that paper. [ expand to 2 hops ] — adds papers reached through this work's immediate citers/citees. Heavier; up to 60 extra dots.

References (34)

Source provenance

openalex
last seen: 2026-06-10T17:14:06.276822+00:00
License: CC0 · commercial use OK