Transvaginal longitudinal ultrasonography in diagnosis of carcinoma of the urinary bladder.

In order to determine the staging of urinary bladder tumors accurately, it is very important to choose a suitable method of treatment and to reach the correct prognosis. In 1974, Watanabe and Holm performed the first transurethral and transrectal ultrasonography. They obtained sonograms of the involved bladder wall by radial scanning using a rotation transducer. The only weak point of this method is the difficulty of staging tumors in the apex, the neck, and the fundus of the bladder by transverse scanning. In 1982, Sekine et al repeated the results of testing a new transrectal transducer for electronic linear scanning in a urologic clinic. However, to our knowledge, no description of the transvaginal technique for routine vesical ultrasonography has appeared in the English-written literature. The purpose of this study is to visualize bladder tumors by longitudinal transvaginal scanning and to evaluate the new method for the staging of urinary bladder tumors.