Assessment of fasted and fed gastrointestinal contraction frequencies in healthy subjects using continuously tagged MRI

Abstract

Background: Continuously tagged MRI during free breathing can assess bowel motility at frequencies as low as the slow wave, motility pattern range. This study aimed to evaluate noninvasive gastrointestinal-tagged MRI for small bowel motility assessment and to observe the physiological response to a 300-kcal meal challenge in healthy, overnight-fasted volunteers.Methods: After overnight fasting, 16 healthy subjects (7 women, mean age 25.5, range 19-37 years) underwent a free breathing, tagged MRI scan to capture small bowel motility. Each subject underwent a (a) baseline motility scan, (b) food challenge, (c) postchallenge scan, and (d) second postchallenge scan (after 20 minutes).Motility was quantified using a frequency analysis technique for measuring the spectral power of the strain, referred to as motility score. Motility score was assessed in 20 frequency intervals between 1 and 20 contractions per minute (cpm), and the data were analyzed with linear mixed-effect models. Key Result:The stimulation protocol demonstrated an immediate, food-induced, motility response in the low-frequency range (2-10 cpm), which is consistent with the stomach and small bowel frequency range (3-12 cpm). Conclusions and Inferences:This study shows that this MRI tagging technique is able to quantify the fasted-to-fed response to a 300-kcal meal challenge within the specific small bowel motility frequency range in healthy subjects. The food provocation MRI protocol provides a tool to explore the gut's response to a stimulus in specific motility frequency ranges in patients with gastrointestinal dysmotility and functional disorders. K E Y W O R D Sdynamic MRI, food challenge, motility, small bowel, SPAMM-tagged MRI This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

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