Diagnostic Accuracy of Magnetic Resonance Imaging versus Clinical Staging in Cervical Cancer

Background: Cervical cancer is the third most common gynecological cancer and a widespread malignancy inwomen, accounting for a large proportion of the cancer burden in developing countries. We compared accuracyof MRI staging with clinical staging and also concordance between the two methods for newly diagnosed patientswith cervical cancer, using clinical staging as the reference. Materials and
Methods: This prospective study wasconducted on 27 newly diagnosed patients with cervical cancer from Imam Khomeini hospital from June 2012to Feb 2014. New cases of cervical cancer with positive PAP test were staged separately with a clinical exambased on the FIGO system by a gynecologist, oncologist and also with MRI by an expert radiologist. Then wecompared the predicted stage for each patient with the two methods.
Results: Based on clinical staging 9 patients(33%) were observed at stage 1. MRI staging was in coordination with clinical staging in eight of them and forone patient MRI accorded stage 2B (88% concordance).
Conclusions: MRI is a reliable noninvasive methodwith high accuracy for cervical cancer staging. Also presently it is easily obtainable, so we recommend using thistechnique along with clinical examination for staging cervical cancer patients. We also recommend to radiologistsand residents of radiology to get experience with this method of staging.