Multislice CT of the Stomach

Multislice CT offers new opportunities for the imaging of gastrointestinal organs. With thin collimation, excellent imaging of the stomach becomes possible and allows for high-quality multiplanar reformations and 3D visualization. Adequate distension of the stomach using water as a negative contrast agent (hydro-CT) is a prerequisite for assessing the stomach wall. While such techniques have already been used with single-slice spiral CT to improve staging of gastric malignancies, single slice suffers substantially from relatively large slice thickness (Fishman et al. 1996; Baert et al. 1989; Merino et al. 1999). The much faster speed of multislice CT means that optimal contrast material injection techniques are essential (Fleischmann et al. 2000) in order to improve delineation of tumour from normal tissue. Indeed, the combination of hydro-CT with near isotropic multislice imaging offers improved diagnosis to a large variety of gastric diseases. Compared with endosonography, multislice CT is able not only to visualize the immediate vicinity of the stomach, but also more distant regions, such as para-aortic lymph nodes or abdominal organs.