Uterus: Follow-up and detection of recurrent disease

Abstract

Recurrent uterine or cervical cancer can be defined as the presence of a new, recurrent disease following definitive treatment with a curative intent. For cervical cancer, as with ovarian cancer, a cutoff of >6 months post-therapy is used to distinguish recurrent from residual disease (Liyanage et al. 2010). However, this time-scale is somewhat arbitrary and the distinction does not impact on management, making it less clinically relevant. The imaging of recurrent disease in endometrial carcinoma and uterine sarcoma is essentially identical, thus we employ the term uterine cancer herein.