It is the physical examination season again, and now everyone's life is fast-paced and stressful, the gastrointestinal tract is prone to discomfort, and related examinations are becoming more and more common. What are the common gastrointestinal tests? What are their respective roles?
Different tests target different problems, complement each other, and complement each other, so clinically, a variety of tests are often combined to obtain a more definite diagnostic basis.
There are several more common gastrointestinal examinations: gastroscopy, barium test, ultrasound endoscopy, CT, together to understand.
1. Gastroscopy
As a medical endoscope, the gastroscope can directly observe the upper gastrointestinal tract to the duodenum, especially minor lesions, and perform pathological biopsy and cytology of the suspicious lesion site to further clarify the diagnosis.
Gastroscopy can directly observe lesions in the upper gastrointestinal tract, especially small lesions that are difficult to find on barium dietiography, and is the preferred examination method for upper gastrointestinal lesions.
Biopsies of the suspected lesion sites can be performed during gastroscopy to obtain pathological evidence, which cannot be replaced by other tests.
However, in gastroscopy, the doctor needs to use a thin, soft tube through the mouth, esophagus into the stomach, will bring a certain degree of discomfort, you can also consult a doctor, if necessary, you can choose painless gastroscopy.
Second, barium meal inspection
After the subject swallows the developer barium sulfate, it is an examination method to diagnose the upper gastrointestinal disease by X-ray imaging of the barium agent through the esophagus to the stomach and duodenum.
By observing the morphology, peristalsis, flexibility and motor function of the digestive tract, the location, size, scope, depth and so on of the lesion are understood.
Barium is mostly passable for narrow areas that cannot be accessed by gastroscopes, so the X-ray barium meal is more able to reflect the internal structure of the stenosis, or atresia, than the gastroscope.
Barium meal is an effective and practical method for measuring gastric function, and has certain advantages for observing whether the gastrointestinal anastomosis is narrow or not, and other postoperative changes in the stomach and esophagus.
X-ray barium meal is also an effective supplement to gastroscopy, especially in patients with lesions at the junction of the gastroesophageal, even if there is a gastroscopic diagnosis, it is necessary to perform barium x-ray meal examination, so that the degree of esophageal invasion is understood before surgery, and the surgical plan and resection range are determined, so as to better improve the quality of surgery.
3. Endoscopic ultrasonography (EUS)
As the name suggests, this is a gastrointestinal examination technique that combines endoscopy and ultrasound, with a miniature high-frequency ultrasound probe placed at the tip of the endoscope. After endoscopic insertion into the body cavity, endoscopic direct observation of gastrointestinal mucosal lesions can be used to scan in real time using endoscopic ultrasound.
EUS can show the hierarchical structure of the gastric wall, and then judge the depth of invasion of the tumor, which can accurately reflect the situation of the primary lesion, which has certain advantages for ulcerative early gastric cancer, and the accuracy rate is higher in the T stage of tumor.
Ultrasound can also determine the benign and malignant lymph nodes around the lesion, but due to the limitation of the penetration distance of the ultrasound beam, the accuracy of the overall lymphatic metastasis and distant metastasis is not high.
4. CT
That is, electronic computer tomography, the use of X-ray beams to a certain thickness of the human body to scan, by the detector to receive X-rays through the level, after a series of conversion, processing, reconstruction of the cross-sectional image of the human body.
CT has high clinical value in distinguishing the origin and nature of gastric diseases, benign and malignant gastrointestinal stenosis, assessing the preoperative staging of tumors, and predicting the likelihood of surgical resection.
CT can obtain the size of the lesion and the extent and extent of thickening of the cavity wall, as well as the infiltration and metastasis of the surrounding organs, which is helpful for the characterization and staging of the disease.
Compared with other test methods, CT examination is easy to operate, and can be basically applied to people of all ages, with few contraindications, and it is also suitable for patients with severe cardiopulmonary diseases and congenital malformations. However, CT is relatively high in radiation doses and is generally used as an important supplement rather than to detect lesions.
Written by / Zhang Huan
Edited by / Connie Han