Crohn's disease: Activity, complications and treatment. Evaluation using MDCT enterography and endoscopy

Activity of small bowel inflammatory disease, mainly Crohn's disease had traditionally been a challenging task for radiologists and gastroenterologists. Conventional radiologic and endoscopic evaluations are frequently hindered by the length and caliber of small bowel loops. Conventional CT plays a significant role in the evaluation of extraenteric manifestations of small bowel disease, although it has a limited role for depicting bowel wall and luminal abnormalities. With the development of CT enterography, evolving new methods for evaluating the small bowel mucosal and submucosal abnormality were considered a byproduct of the recent advances in multidetector-row CT (MDCT) technology. Endoscopic correlation with imaging modalities are complementary tools for the final diagnosis of activity and complications of Crohn's disease. Our purpose was to evaluate retrospectively the effectiveness of CT enterography for the assessment of the activity as well as diagnosing complications of Crohn's disease in 25 patients with a complementary role determined by colonoscopy with intubation of the terminal ileum and correlate with disease progression or regression and its treatment. (C) 2012 Egyptian Society of Radiology and Nuclear Medicine. Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.