A Novel Technique for Global Small Bowel Motility Assessment Using Dynamic MRI

Alex Menys¹, Stuart A. Taylor¹, Anton Emmanuel², Asia Ahmed¹, Andrew Plumb¹, Freddy Odille³, ⁴, Ahsan Alam², Steve Halligan¹, David Atkinson¹

Aberrant small bowel motility is described in a range of diseases including chronic intestinal pseudo-obstruction, Crohns disease and irritable bowel syndrome. Few tools exist to investigate abnormal motility and those that do are often invasive and fail to assess the whole of the small bowel. This article describes the validation of a novel MRI technique which safely and non-invasively quantifies global small bowel motility, reporting within-subject repeatability in healthy human subjects and sensitivity to the motility altering drugs butylscopolamine and neostigmine.