I had to fill my vagina with ultrasound gel yesterday for an MRI... I had no idea this was a protocol for measuring endometriosis! how cool It's a technique called vaginal opacification... the vagina is normally a collapsed space, and on an MRI, collapsed walls are hard to tell apart from the tissues right next to them When you fill the space with gel, it distends the walls and separates the structures so the radiologist can see the boundaries better One of the hardest places to detect deep infiltrating endometriosis is the area behind your uterus. Lesions there are small, fibrotic, and often missed The gel shows up as a bright signal on the images, so any lesion pressing into or growing through the vaginal wall appears as a dark nodule against that bright background Endo affects 1 in 10 women, usually takes 7 years to diagnose, and traditionally requires surgery for diagnosis.... this MRI protocol is an alternative route for detecting deep endo