Objective: This study aims to evaluate the effects of different oral small bowel contrast agents towards the intestinal dilatation and intestinal wall structure exhibition by the abdominal multi - detector row CT (MDCT) examination.
Methods: 80 patients were performed the whole abdominal CT examination, then randomly divided into four groups, with 20 patients in each group. 45 minutes before the CT examination, the patients were served with a total of 1800 ml pure water, pure milk, dilute lactulose solution and isotonic mannitol solution, respectively.
Results: The images were blinded read by two experienced abdominal radiologists in the workstation, the cross-sectional diameters of duodenum, jejunum, proximal and terminal ends of ileum of each patient were measured, then the analysis of variance was performed to analyze the differences in the intestinal dilatation among the experimental groups. The scoring method was used to score the intestinal dilatation and intestinal structure exhibition. The diluted lactulose solution and 2.5% mannitol exhibited the best intestinal dilation degrees. Similarly, the diluted lactulose solution and 2.5% mannitol exhibited the highest scores in the entire small bowel dilatation degree and intestinal structure exhibition.
Conclusions: 2.5% osmotic mannitol and the diluted lactulose solution enabled the full dilatation of small bowel, and could clearly exhibit the wall structure.
Keywords: CT-enterography; Multi-slice spiral CT; oral contrast agent; small bowel.