Jan 3, 2019 – Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine

Abstract

Overall, bowel US is an excellent, safe, and repeatable choice for routine surveillance and for urgent Bowel ultrasound (US) is accurate for assessing bowel inflammation and complications in Crohn disease. Additionally, contrast‐enhanced US provides a quantitative, objective measurement of inflammatory activity in inflammatory bowel disease, and shear wave elastography predicts the stiffness of bowel, an increase of which suggests less response to medical therapy, often necessitating surgery.imaging. We describe an approach to evaluating inflammatory bowel disease and review its features on standard grayscale US with Doppler imaging and show how contrast‐enhanced US and shear wave elastography can distinguish between inflammatory and fibrostenotic bowel.

Authors: Cathy Lu MD; Christina Merrill BSc, CRGS; Alexandra Medellin MD; Kerri Novak MD; Stephanie R. Wilson MD