Ovarian cancer is a common cancer in female genital organs, whose incidence is the third only after cervical cancer and uterine cancer. However, its lethality is top in gynecologic tumors, which threatens women greatly. Obviously ovarian cancer diagnosis is very important and can be divided to early diagnosis, level diagnosis and qualitative diagnosis.

Early Diagnosis

Because ovarian cancer doesn’t show any typical symptoms and physical signs at its early stage that it is important to know the patient history and have gynecologic examinations. Imaging examinations and tumor marker examination should perform to detect ovarian cancer if any following suspicious conditions occur: long lasting ovarian dysfunction, abnormal symptoms of enteron or urinary tract without obvious cause for long time, increasing ovary of young girl or palpable ovaries after menopause, rapid increase and hardening of ovaries.

Level Diagnosis

The patients who have palpable lumps in ovarian appendage can fully be detected combined with imaging examination. But some ovarian cancer cases would develop external metastases when the primary tumor is small and form some nodules diffused in pelvic.

Qualitative Diagnosis

Though ovarian cancer diagnosis technology is developing, there are easy, feasible and fast basic examinations such as imbibing smear examination of posterior fornix, pucture fluid examination of recto-uterine fossa, cytological examination of ascites. Laparoscopy and histological examination can exactly diagnose ovarian cancer cases from suspected cases. Imaging examination, especially ultrasound scanning of vagina can help a qualitative diagnosis of the edge and internal structure of early malignant ovarian tumors. Endocrine examination is inclined to diagnose gonadal stromal tumor of ovary and partial ovarian cancers of ectopic endocrine syndrome. The serum tumor marker test is highly sensitive to ovarian malignant tumor, due to its poorer specificity, immunologic test cannot be the only base to diagnose the type of ovarian cancer. However, combination of multiple tumor marker tests can improve the reliability of diagnosis.

Ovarian cancer specialist from Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou reminded that in order to catch up the best time for treatments, the patient should go to hospital once being diagnosed.