The Role of Functional MRI and Doppler Sonography in Assessing Blood Vessel Formation Within the Tumors of Endometrial Cancer Patients

Adenocarcinoma of the endometrium is the fourth most frequent cancer in women. Surgery is the treatment of choice in patients with noninvasive or locally advanced disease. The surgical technique consists of an exploratory laparotomy, with total hysterectomy, bilateral oophorectomy, peritoneal washing, and, in selected high-risk patients, omental and peritoneal biopsies and lymphadenectomy. Therefore, preoperative clinical and instrumental staging of the local spread of disease, as well as local and distant lymph node involvement, represent a critical step in tailoring the extent and the radicalness of surgery. The role of angiogenesis in cancer growth and metastasis has been gaining much attention for decades. Recent clinical evidence supports this notion. The gradual increase in angiogenesis intensity with tumor progression in malignant melanoma has been reported. Abulafia et al. reported that increasing angiogenicity could be noted from simple hyperplasia, complex hyperplasia, atypical hyperplasia, and Stage IA endometrial carcinoma to invasive endometrial carcinoma. The investigators' research team has shown that incremental angiogenesis could be demonstrated in the tumorigenesis and the possibility of lymph node metastasis in endometrial malignancy. Besides, other growth factors such as vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), transforming growth factor- (TGF-), IL-6 and IL-8 have also been reported to correlate with the angiogenesis and the metastasis of endometrial cancer. It seems that tumor angiogenesis of endometrial cancer could be utilized as an important parameter to assess the disease severity of the endometrial cancer. So, the investigators would like to propose this proposal to focus on the tumor angiogenesis in endometrial cancer patients. There are several purposes in this study. First, the investigators will evaluate and compare tumor angiogenesis surveyed from functional MRI and power Doppler sonography in endometrial cancer patients who rec