Clinical Utility of Intestinal Ultrasound in Ulcerative Colitis Patients

Abstract

Advances in the field of therapeutics in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) have raised the expectation with mucosal healing (MH) is the current target of medical management of IBD and was proven to decrease clinical relapse rate, hospitalization and surgery. Intestinal ultrasound (IUS), usually performed by gastroenterologists as a point-of-care examination, is a radiation-free, non-invasive, well tolerated, cost-effective, easily accessible, accurate and reproducible imaging technique, and allows transmural assessment of the bowel wall. The use of IUS in ulcerative colitis (UC) is often questioned. This is because UC is essentially a mucosal disease, with its involvement starting distally in the rectum, easily reachable by sigmoidoscope. However, several recent studies showed significant IUS findings in UC with bowel wall thickness (BWT) to be the most relevant measure. IUS has been shown to have advantages in UC diagnosis, disease severity assessment, disease extent delineation, and therapy response prediction.