Transabdominal bowel ultrasound as a method of primary diagnosis in acute bowel pathology: literature review and demonstration of clinical cases

Abstract

Currently, transabdominal ultrasound of the bowel is rarely used in daily routine practice to assess bowel condition due to the difficulty of its visualization, lack of awareness of specialists, and also due to the limited number of specialists who know the technique of bowel examination. Patients with acute bowel pathology seek emergency care in more than one third of cases. Gastrointestinal ultrasound is often used as the first imaging modality with good diagnostic accuracy in the setting of acute abdomen and may be the optimal diagnostic strategy in young women because of the radiation burden associated with X-ray and computer tomography scan. The clinician can examine the gastrointestinal tract in the area of greatest pain using ultrasound, thus obtaining more information and pathology data than standard physical examination. Intestinal ultrasound is mainly used for the diagnosis and monitoring of patients with inflammatory bowel disease, which helps to avoid the frequent use of invasive and expensive diagnostic procedures and leads to the early implementation of suitable treatment. This method can also serve to detect other pathological conditions present in the gastrointestinal tract. It is a promising method with high sensitivity and specificity, which has the advantage of being easily accessible, non-invasive, safe, due to the absence of ionising radiation and the need to use contrast agents. In addition, the advantage of this method is the reduction of diagnostic search, which allows the doctor to establish the diagnosis in a shorter time, as well as to reduce the patient’s expenses for expensive examinations.