Susan Pritchard1, Joe Paul1, Giles Major2,3, Luca Marciani2,3, Penny Gowland1, Robin Spiller2,3, and Caroline Hoad1,2
1Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom, 2Nottingham Digestive Diseases Centre, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom, 3Nottingham Digestive Diseases Biomedical Research Unit, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom
Assessment
of colonic motility may be extremely useful in understanding the symptoms of
constipation. Current techniques (manometry, cine-MRI) can only detect wall movements
and not the effect this motion may have on mixing of colonic contents. We
report the use of an MR tagging technique to assess flow and mixing in the
human colon following ingestion of a 500ml macrogol preparation. This technique
successfully identified differences in intracolonic mixing between 11 healthy
and 11 constipated subjects and shows potential to generate novel insights into
the physiology and mechanisms of disease and the environmental pressures on, and
effects of, gut microbiota.
