Michael Dolinger, MD, on Intestinal Ultrasound to Detect Postoperative Crohn Disease Recurrence
In this video, Dr Dolinger reviews his abstract presented at the Crohn's & Colitis Congress 2022 about using intestinal ultrasound to detect recurrence of Crohn disease following resection.
Michael Dolinger, MD, is an advanced pediatric inflammatory bowel disease fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt Sinai in New York, New York.
TRANSCRIPT:
Michael Dolinger, MD: My name's Michael Dolinger. I'm the advanced pediatric inflammatory bowel disease fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. I just presented at the Crohn's and Colitis Congress on the use of intestinal ultrasound to detect postoperative Crohn disease recurrence.
Currently, we know that postoperative Crohn disease recurrence after ileocaecal resection is very common, and that even in high-risk patients, the scope of 6 to 12 months on treatment may show inflammation, and that patients also don't always undergo their colonoscopy and they don't comply with using fecal calprotectin as a serial monitor very often.
We need to develop better noninvasive tools to detect postoperative Crohn disease recurrence. We believe that intestinal ultrasound is an ideal tool to directly do this in real-time in the routine clinic visit. What we were able to do is take 21 adults who underwent ileocaecal resection, and then postoperative colonoscopy within 6 to 12 months, and match that with an intestinal ultrasound at the same time.
We found that intestinal ultrasound is very accurate to detect endoscopic Crohn disease recurrence, and that a bowel wall thickness on ultrasound of 3.2 millimeters is a sufficient cutoff to predict endoscopic disease recurrence with very high sensitivity and specificity. Ultrasound itself is an excellent imaging modality to detect postoperative Crohn disease recurrence.
The future application of this is that may be able to use intestinal ultrasound early, earlier at 1-month postoperative, 3-months postoperative, 6-months postoperative to detect Crohn's disease recurrence and alter the treatment strategy for our postoperative patients.
