The Role of Intestinal Ultrasound in Monitoring the Response to Biological Therapy in Patients With Ulcerative Colitis

Ultrasound examination is an easily accessible, non-invasive, radiation-free technique, and cheap imaging modality that is often chosen as the first diagnostic method in gastroenterology disease.

performance of bowel ultrasound use of two different probes: low-frequency convex probe (3.0-3.5 MHz) and high-frequency linear probe (5-17 MHz) .

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic inflammatory disease of the gastrointestinal tract, which clinically contains Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, and other conditions. IBD is characterized by episodes of abdominal pain, diarrhea, bloody stools, weight loss, and the influx of neutrophils and macrophages that produce cytokines, proteolytic enzymes

Intestinal ultrasound has been shown to have high sensitivity and specificity in the detection or exclusion of intestinal inflammatory activity in IBD. advantages of intestinal ultrasound over other imaging modalities include non-invasiveness, rapid availability and low costs ,evaluation of bowel wall thickness, as well as stratification that reflects alterations in histopathology ulcerative colitis (UC). Visualization of the vascularization of the bowel using color Doppler sonography and, direct visualization of motility.

A study done : IUS is preferred for monitoring the disease course and for assessing short-term treatment response. Found that monitoring bowel wall thickening (BWT) alone has the potential to predict the therapeutic response.The primary therapeutic goal in UC is to induce and maintain long-term disease remission; however, there is no single treatment pathwayguidelines recommend the use of either conventional therapies (i.e., aminosalicylates ..etc)Or the use of biologic therapies ( infliximab.)