Pelvic floor disorders: what's the best test?

Pelvic floor dysfunctions represent a common health problem affecting particularly post-menopausal women impacting significantly the quality of life. A large number of these patients suffer for many years without proper treatment often due to the lack of objective findings necessary to plan proper treatment. Because abnormalities of the different pelvic compartments are frequently associated, thorough diagnostic characterization of how many compartments are affected is paramount in order to plan the management approach that can include a multidisciplinary surgical approach. This pictorial essay will review the different imaging methods used for the characterization of these disorders, how to do them and its rationale providing a clinically understandable interpretation with clinical correlates and a correlation between fluoroscopic and MR defecography in order to illustrate the strengths and shortcomings of each. The need to use a standardized, reliable, and clinically understandable method of quantification has become more obvious in the last decades with the increasing rate of scientific and professional interchanges. A review of the grading systems used to convey the imaging findings also highlights the importance of using a standardized tool for comparing and communicating clinical findings understandable to referring physicians with proven inter-observer and intra-observer agreement of the examinations.