Enhanced Monitoring of Urethral and Bladder Mobility in Postpartum Stress Urinary Incontinence using Combined Ultrasound Techniques

TL;DR

This study compares two ultrasound techniques to assess bladder and urethral mobility in postpartum women for stress urinary incontinence detection.

Contribution

The study demonstrates that biplanar transrectal ultrasound reliably complements transperineal pelvic floor ultrasound for SUI diagnosis.

Findings

Biplanar transrectal and transperineal pelvic floor ultrasounds showed strong consistency in assessing bladder mobility.

97.5% of data points fell within the 95% consistency limit for pelvic floor observation indices.

Biplanar transrectal ultrasound is a reliable supplementary method for diagnosing stress urinary incontinence.

Abstract

This study aimed to compare the consistency between smart pelvic floor ultrasound and biplanar transrectal ultrasound in detecting early stress urinary incontinence (SUI) by assessing urethral dilation and bladder structure.

We selected 40 multiparas who went through prenatal assessment after delivery and had standard pelvic floor ultrasounds at 6 weeks after childbirth, spanning from June 2022 to September 2022. The Bland-Altman method was employed to evaluate the consistency between biplanar transrectal ultrasound and transperineal pelvic floor ultrasound in assessing the mobility of the bladder neck and the posterior bladder wall in women.

Biplanar transrectal ultrasound and transperineal pelvic floor ultrasound demonstrated strong consistency in evaluating bladder neck and posterior bladder wall mobility in women (P>0.05). The analysis of each pelvic floor observation index using Bland-Altman plots indicated that approximately 97.5% of data points fell within the 95% consistency limit.

Our findings suggest that biplanar transrectal ultrasound is a reliable supplementary method to transperineal pelvic floor ultrasound for diagnosing SUI.

Figures