ArticleReproductive biology and endocrinology : RB&E2017
Evaluation of the cervix tissue homogeneity by ultrasound elastography in infertile women for the prediction of embryo transfer ease: a diagnostic accuracy study.
Article in Reproductive biology and endocrinology : RB&E, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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8 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 34 citations in OpenAlex.
- Diagnostic accuracy of cervical elastography in predicting preterm delivery: A systematic review and meta-analysis.Medicine · 2019Pooled it
- Acromegalic Uteropathy: Specific Uterine Ultrasound Findings in Female Patients.Diagnostics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Evaluation of stiffness values of normal uterine myometrium by 3T magnetic resonance elastography.Frontiers in medicine · 2026Article
- Elasticity of the Cervix in Relation to Uterus Position.Journal of clinical medicine · 2024Article
- The use of real time strain endometrial elastosonography plus endometrial thickness and vascularization flow index to predict endometrial receptivity in IVF treatments: a pilot study.BMC medical imaging · 2023Observational
- Hysteroscopic cervical features associated with difficult embryo transfer in unselected patients undergoing in vitro fertilization.Biomedical journal · 2022Article
- Menstrual Pain and Elasticity of Uterine Cervix.Journal of clinical medicine · 2021Article
- Influence of epidemiological characteristics (age, parity and other factors) in the assessment of healthy uterine cervical stiffness evaluated through shear wave elastography as a prior step to its use in uterine cervical pathology.Archives of gynecology and obstetrics · 2020Article
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Authors and funding
6 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundUltrasound elastography is a non-invasive medical imaging technique able to quantitatively characterize the stiffness of a given tissue. It has been shown to predict the risk for cervical insufficiency and preterm delivery, and to allow differentiation of malignancy from normal tissue. The present study sought to evaluate whether cervical tissue dishomogeneity, as assessed by cervical ultrasound elastography, may predict the embryo transfer (ET) ease in infertile women undergoing IVF/ICSI.
methodsWe evaluated 154 infertile patients with no history of previous ET or intrauterine insemination. Cervical stiffness was evaluated in six regions of interest (ROI), compared two by two to obtain strain ratio (SR) values. Since a SR value of 1 was suggestive of tissue homogeneity, we computed 1-SR/SR-1 values to obtain a measure of the degree of cervical tissue dishomogeneity that we named "dishomogeneity index" (DI). Ultrasound-guided ET was performed by an expert operator blinded to the results of cervical elastography. The prediction ability of elastography on ET ease was evaluated by binary logistic regression, and the predictive accuracy of the independent variables was quantified with area under the curve (AUC) estimates derived from receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve.
resultsET resulted to be easy in 99 out of 154 patients (64,2%), difficult in 54 patients (35%), and impossible in one. DI values in cervical medial lips region correctly classified 86.9% of patients, according to binary logistic regression, with a sensitivity of 81.4% and a specificity of 89,9%, positive likelihood ratio (LR) 8.07 and negative LR of 0.21. A DI cut-off value of 0.29 predicted a difficulty of ET with a sensitivity of 88,9% and a specificity of 85%.
conclusionsCervical ultrasound elastography, by allowing the identification of cervical tissue dishomogeneity, may be of help in predicting the ET ease in infertile women candidates to IVF/ICSI.
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