Diagnostic performance of computed tomography for bowel endometriosis: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Systematic review / meta-analysis OA: closed CC0 ⤵ 9 in-corpus citations
View on OpenAlex View on PubMed View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated summary by gemini-2.5-flash-lite, 2026-07-09 ⓘ

This systematic review and meta-analysis found that CT has excellent diagnostic performance for bowel endometriosis, with pooled sensitivity of 0.92 and specificity of 0.95.

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

Abstract

PURPOSE: To perform a systematic review and meta-analysis regarding the performance of CT for diagnosis of bowel endometriosis. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Pubmed and EMBASE were systematically searched up to March 28, 2019. Diagnostic accuracy studies using CT for diagnosis of bowel endometriosis using laparoscopy followed by histopathology as the reference standard were included. Methodological quality of the included studies was evaluated using Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies-2. Sensitivity and specificity were pooled using hierarchical summary receiver operating modelling. Meta-regression analysis was done to explore heterogeneity. RESULTS: Twelve studies (1091 patients) were included. Pooled sensitivity and specificity were 0.92 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.83-0.97) and 0.95 (95% CI, 0.88-0.98), respectively. Substantial heterogeneity was present: I2 = 92.38% for sensitivity and 89.09% for specificity. Deeks' asymmetry test suggested publication bias (p = 0.04). At meta-regression analysis, history of prior surgery for endometriosis was the only significant factor affecting heterogeneity (p < 0.01). Specifically, studies that included patients with such history demonstrated significantly greater specificity than studies that did not (0.95 [95% CI, 0.91-1.00] vs 0.75 [95% CI, 0.43-1.00]). CONCLUSIONS: CT shows excellent performance in the diagnosis of bowel endometriosis. Due to small number of included studies and publication bias, further studies may be needed to validate these results.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

Condition tags

endometriosisbowel_endometriosis

MeSH descriptors

Endometriosis Intestinal Neoplasms Tomography, X-Ray Computed Adolescent Adolescent Adult Adult Endometriosis Endometriosis Equipment Design Equipment Design Female Female Humans Humans Intestinal Neoplasms Intestinal Neoplasms Middle Aged Middle Aged Sensitivity and Specificity

Citation neighborhood (2-hop)

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. Outer rings show 2-hop neighbours — papers reached through the immediate citers/citees. [ collapse to 1-hop ]

References (31)

Cited by (8)

Source provenance

europepmc
last seen: 2026-10-14T06:08:39.101224+00:00
openalex
last seen: 2026-06-10T17:14:06.276822+00:00
pubmed
last seen: 2026-10-08T21:25:22.513924+00:00
License: CC0 · commercial use OK