“…In rectal cancer staging, both transrectal ultrasonography (TRUS), CT and MR imaging have all been evaluated for assessing both tumour infiltration in the bowel wall and loco-regional lymph node metastases [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21]. Despite initial promising results and subsequent technical developments of the methods, the overall results in large series of patients indicate that presently routine staging of rectal cancer cannot be justified, because the accuracy to predict tumour penetration and lymph node metastases is limited [22,23,24,25].…”