Clinical and Endoscopic Significance of Bowel-Wall Thickening Reported on Abdominal Computed Tomographies in Symptomatic Patients with No History of Gastrointestinal Disease
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Bowel-wall thickening (BWT) is a commonly reported finding on diagnostic abdominal pelvic computed tomographies (CT) in patients with no history of gastroenterologic disease. The significance of this nonspecific finding is not clear. METHODS: Medical records from the Vancouver General Hospital were reviewed from October 27, 1999, to October 27, 2009. The initial search yielded 5696 cases, of which 76 cases met the inclusion criteria for review. Inclusion criteria were the following: age older than 18 years, symptoms without a diagnosis of gastrointestinal disease before CT, the reported finding of terminal ileal and/or colonic BWT, colonoscopy after CT, and/or microbiologic investigations. Exclusion criteria included known gastrointestinal disease before CT. The primary objective was to determine if BWT could be associated with a significant endoscopic pathology. The secondary objective was to determine whether the pattern of abnormality on the CT was associated with a specific endoscopic finding. RESULTS: A total of 76 patients met the inclusion criteria of our study. Of those, 76% had various identifiable pathologies on colonoscopy. Only 24% had normal colonoscopic findings. Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and infectious colitis were the most common causes of BWT. A report of "skip lesions" on the CT (5%) was always associated with IBD. "Pancolitis" reported on the CT (11%) was associated with endoscopic findings of IBD in 25% of cases, infection in 50% of cases, and normal findings in 25% of cases. The report of "stranding" (36%) on CT in the presence of BWT was associated with many non-neoplastic endoscopic pathologic processes, including infectious colitis (22%), IBD (19%), and ischemia (15%), but also was associated with normal endoscopic findings in 26% of the cases. "Lymphadenopathy" was reported in 17% of the CTs and was associated with infectious colitis (30%), IBD (38%), or neoplastic processes (15%) but also normal endoscopic findings in 15%. CONCLUSION: Symptomatic patients who are found to have nonspecific BWT on CT should undergo definitive endoscopic investigation because the majority will have significant gastroenterologic disease, and only a minority will have a normal colonoscopy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".