Paediatric bowel ultrasound in inflammatory bowel disease.

Ultrasound has long been favoured as first line when imaging children, primarily due to it being a non-invasive, relatively low cost, easily accessible modality. The many advantages of ultrasound evaluation in paediatric inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) vastly outweighs its limitations in both initial assessment and long term follow up. High frequency ultrasound provides excellent spatial resolution, and Doppler evaluation and compression sonography aids in providing real-time dynamic assessment in IBD where other modalities cannot.

The smaller bowel: imaging the small bowel in paediatric Crohn's disease.

Crohn's disease begins in childhood in 20% of cases. Imaging of the small bowel is needed for diagnosis and management and also to inform the clinician of the location, extent, and activity of disease. There are several modalities available to image the small bowel and the combined use of these is often required to optimise benefit.