Fast Magnetic Resonance Enterography Protocol for the Evaluation of Patients with Crohn's Disease: A Pilot Study

Magnetic resonance enterography has achieved an increasingly importance in the evaluation of patients with Crohn's disease, although it is limited by high costs and prolonged scanning times. The aim of our work was to design a "fast" abbreviated MRE protocol and to compare it with the standard one.

A single-center retrospective study was performed on 73 patients with Crohn's disease who underwent MRE with standard protocol over a 7-month period. The images of the standard protocol were separated from those included in the proposed abbreviated one and independently evaluated by two radiologists with different years of experience in MRE imaging. Statistical analysis was performed with the Cohen kappa (κ) value, used to assess the agreement in case of categorical variables, the Lin's concordance correlation coefficient and Bland-Altman plot, in assessing the degree of agreement between numerical measurements, while the non- parametric Mann-Whitney U-test was used in comparing the evaluation times of the two protocols.

The intraobserver evaluation showed a perfect agreement between the two protocols for presence, number and extension of lesions, abdominal complications, and excellent/perfect in identification of active inflammation.The interobserver reproducibility was excellent for overall presence and number of lesions, for the presence and number of lesions in any abdominal quadrant, inflammation, intestinal and extraintestinal complications, and lesions extension.

The proposed protocol achieves comparable performance with standard MRE. Furthermore, it would carry potential benefits in terms of patient's comfort, time, and health-care costs savings.