Fig. 3

The influence of leiomyoma location on the difficulty of myomectomy. To assess the relationship between the level of difficulty of minimal skin incision abdominal myomectomy and the characteristics of leiomyoma, we extracted the location of dominant leiomyoma as determined with diagnostic imaging. Target leiomyomas were classified into the two types as follows: anterior, posterior, and fundal leiomyomas (a, b) and intramural, subserous, and submucous leiomyomas (c, d). There was no patient whose dominant leiomyoma was a submucous leiomyoma. The location of dominant leiomyomas had no significant impact on the average operation time (a, c) or amount of bleeding (b, d). However, fundal leiomyomas showed a tendency of shorter operation time than anterior leiomyomas (P = 0.068) or posterior leiomyomas (P = 0.083). The number of patients in each group divided by the location of dominant leiomyomas was as follows: a, b: Anterior leiomyoma, n = 40; posterior leiomyoma, n = 31; fundal leiomyoma, n = 5. c, d: Intramural leiomyoma, n = 64; subserous leiomyoma, n = 12