CT Small Bowel Pathologies - Video Lesson

Hey everybody, welcome back. This lesson is about the two most common small bowel pathologies observed in CT imaging. We'll start with Crohn's disease. Crohn's disease is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease that most commonly involves the terminal ileum. This condition is idiopathic, meaning there is no known cause. A patient with Crohn's disease will experience frequent flares of bowel inflammation for no particular reason. This inflammation can occur anywhere in the bowel, but it's most common in the last segment of the small bowel called the terminal ileum. In CT, it typically presents as segmental bowel wall thickening with hyperenhancement. Fat stranding, fistulas, and abscesses are common complications. Several of those processes are observed in this patient. In the right lower quadrant in the area of the terminal ileum, we see a loop of small bowel that has an abnormally thick wall. Normally, the walls of the small bowel are very thin. We can also see the