Diffusion-weighted MRI in pediatric inflammatory bowel disease.

Abstract

Pediatric patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) commonly need repetitive imaging to assess disease activity and complications. Recently, MR enterography has become a first-line radiologic study in children with IBD because of improved image quality, excellent soft-tissue contrast resolution, and lack of ionizing radiation. The purpose of this article is to describe the use of diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) in MR enterography and the evaluation of pediatric IBD. Several contemporary publications have shown that DWI can be useful for assessing both pediatric and adult patients with IBD as an important adjunct pulse sequence. Specifically, DWI can be used to identify abnormal bowel segments, assess disease inflammatory activity, and detect and characterize a variety of extraintestinal IBD-related manifestations and complications.