ABSTRACT
The utility of radiographic studies for the diagnosis of stress incontinence and pelvic prolapse-–an analysis of the evidence base The crux of clinical research and ultimately clinical practice concerned with the imaging of urinary incontinence (UI) and pelvic organ prolapse (POP) is to establish if there is a clinical benefit to the measurements that are obtained. Imaging is a method to evaluate anatomy of the individual patient and to diagnose conditions depending on the morphological or functional modifications of individual organs or structures. Imaging can confirm or augment the findings of physical examination, and may provide information that is otherwise unattainable. The identification of the clinical scenarios in which this additional information is beneficial to the management of the patient is the ultimate measure of the utility of the study. Although we may postulate that intraobserver and interobserver variability of physical examination is higher when compared to imaging, this may not necessarily always be true, as well as the assumption that a correlate always exists between the two modalities.
