Intestinal ultrasonography diagnostic performance and feasibility in IBD during pregnancy: a systematic review and narrative synthesis.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD), including Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC), are associated to poor maternal and foetal outcomes during pregnancy, requiring a strict monitoring of the disease activity, preferably with non-invasive modalities. There are numerous data confirming intestinal ultrasonography (IUS) accuracy and efficacy for the detection of IBD disease activity and complications, but data in pregnant IBD patients are scarce. We aimed to evaluate the diagnostic performance and feasibility of IUS to monitor IBD activity throughout pregnancy. Methods: A systematic literature review was performed to identify studies on the use of ultrasound modality in pregnant inflammatory bowel disease women from the date of inception until April 2024 using MEDLINE, Cochrane Library, EMBASE, and ISI Web of Science databases, with keywords including (1) ultrasound/ultrasonography, (2) pregnancy, and (3) IBD (CD and UC). Additional relevant studies were identified from cross-referencing and hand-searches of references of the retrieved articles. We included fully published observational studies and abstracts. Results: Overall, five studies have been selected from 264 citations. All studies were highly heterogeneous in the definition of disease activity as reference standard, IUS protocols, and outcomes. Two of them used a cut-off value of faecal calprotectin (FCP) >100 μg/g. In one of them, clinical scores were used when the FCP value was ≥100-249 μg/g and FCP ≥250 μg/g was considered as an active disease independently of clinical scores. Only one study used a single reference standard with a Harvey-Bradshaw Index (HBI) >4. Across these 3 studies, results suggest a relatively good specificity (range 83-98%) but low sensitivity (range 33-84%) to detect disease's activity. Only 1 study analysed IUS performance in detecting remission with a sensitivity of 80% and a specificity of 92% compared to the reference standard. The size of the uterus limits the visualization of the terminal ileum and the sigmoid from the second trimester and the third trimester, respectively. The evaluation of the rectum remains limited. Conclusion: IUS appears to offer a practical, readily available and non-invasive means of monitoring disease activity in IBD pregnant women. However, existing literature on IUS accuracy is limited and further studies with standardized reference comparator are needed.
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 | 0.013 | 0.061 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".