Medical Needs

Abstract

Diagnosis of UC is based on a combination of medical history, clinical symptoms, laboratory tests, and imaging data: no single imaging technique serves as a diagnostic gold standard for the diagnosis of UC. For clinical practice, some important informations about disease can settle some choice on patient’s management and therapy: disease activity, extent of inflammation, age of patient and of onset of symptoms, presence of intestinal or extraintestinal complications. Colonoscopy with biopsies plays an extremely important role in the diagnostic path and management of ulcerative colitis: it allows defining the presence and type of injury, as well as the extent of disease and the extent of histological involvement, but it is an invasive procedure, not always accepted by patients and not devoid of complications. So various radiologic methods, thanks to the technological development, have been proposed in recent years and have become now very important tools for the diagnosis and evaluation of patients with ulcerative colitis: they may not represent a valid alternative to endoscopy for now, but employed properly that they can be considered complementary methods. The most used diagnostic imaging modalities, including bowel ultrasound (US), computed tomography (CT), and magnetic resonance (MR), may be highly useful to highlight several intestinal abnormalities and to detect extraintestinal manifestations, and can help the clinician to determine the most appropriate therapy and future behavior.