Magnetic Resonance-Guided High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound Treatment of Uterine Fibroids: The First Egyptian Experience

Mohamed Fawzi, Eman Zaki Nossair, Mohamed Ali Bakry
In: The Arab Journal of Interventional Radiology · 2022 · doi:10.1055/s-0042-1756235 · W4317422559
article OA: diamond CC0
🔓 Open OA copy Full text JSON View on OpenAlex View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-10 · read from full text ⓘ

This paper reports the first Egyptian experience with magnetic resonance–guided high-intensity focused ultrasound (MR-HIFU) for symptomatic uterine fibroids, enrolling 20 reproductive-aged women with 30 fibroids (3–12 cm) treated over 9 months and followed with MRI measures including fibroid T1/T2 signals, Funaki type, and nonperfused volume. Directly after treatment, all 30 fibroids achieved at least 70% nonperfused volume on contrast-enhanced MRI, and follow-up at 6 months documented significant symptom relief (especially bleeding), improved hemoglobin, and at least 30% fibroid size reduction in subsequent measurements. The main caveat is that this is a single-institution, first-cohort report with limited detail on study design and no explicitly stated comparative control group. The paper does not explicitly discuss endometriosis or adenomyosis; it was included in the corpus via a keyword match in the upstream search index.

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

Abstract

Introduction: Uterine fibroids are benign encapsulated uterine tumors that disrupt the functions of the uterus causing many symptoms ranging from menorrhagia and dysmenorrhea to recurrent pregnancy loss, and infertility, and are the most common reason for hysterectomy in premenopausal women. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-guided high-intensity focused ultrasound (MR-HIFU) is a recent very low-pain to painless noninvasive procedure that has shown excellent therapeutic efficacy in treating uterine fibroids. Here, we present the MRI findings of the first cohort of Egyptian women with uterine fibroids who underwent MR-HIFU.
Full text 2,724 characters · extracted from oa-doi-fallback · 4 sections · click to expand

Introduction

Uterine fibroids are benign encapsulated uterine tumors that disrupt the functions of the uterus causing many symptoms ranging from menorrhagia and dysmenorrhea to recurrent pregnancy loss, and infertility, and are the most common reason for hysterectomy in premenopausal women. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-guided high-intensity focused ultrasound (MR-HIFU) is a recent very low-pain to painless noninvasive procedure that has shown excellent therapeutic efficacy in treating uterine fibroids. Here, we present the MRI findings of the first cohort of Egyptian women with uterine fibroids who underwent MR-HIFU.

Materials and methods

Twenty Egyptian female patients in their reproductive age (18–45 years) with a total of 30 symptomatic uterine fibroids measuring between 3 and 12 cm in diameter underwent MR-HIFU treatment in the National Hepatology and Tropical Medicine Research Institute, Cairo, Egypt over a period of 9 months (Feb 2021–Dec 2021). Fibroid size, T1 and T2 signal intensities, and Funaki type and nonperfused volume of uterine fibroids were recorded pre- and/or posttreatment. The mean fibroid volume change after 6 months was also noted. Also, symptom relief was recorded.

Result

Remarkably, all 30 fibroids showed no less than 70% nonperfused volume in the contrast-enhanced MRI performed directly after the session. Follow-up showed significant relief in the primary symptoms mainly bleeding and significant improvement in Hemoglobin level and also follow-up size reduction was measured and showed at least 30% decrease in size.

Conclusions

Our institution is the first to introduce the ground-breaking technology of MR-HIFU in Egypt. We have shown high efficacy of MR-HIFU in the treatment of uterine fibroids in Egyptian women. Our results have great potential of the wider use of this minimally invasive and effective treatment of uterine fibroids not just in Egypt but all the Middle East and Africa. Publication History Article published online: 17 August 2022 © 2022. The Pan Arab Interventional Radiology Society. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) Thieme Medical and Scientific Publishers Pvt. Ltd. A-12, 2nd Floor, Sector 2, Noida-201301 UP, India

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

dysmenorrheainfertility

Citation neighborhood (no data yet)

We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. The paper's references may be in our DB but unresolved to ``paper_id`` (resolution happens at ingest when the cited DOI matches a row we already have). Run the cross-source citation reconcile pass to retry.

Source provenance

openalex
last seen: 2026-06-04T00:00:01.174412+00:00
License: CC0 · commercial use OK