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Note: My blogging is suffering. Partially because of a busy work schedule and more due to a sustained case of writer’s block. I am taking the easy way out by starting this series of posts on colorectal cancers. I have said it a few times before in my blog and it bears repeating that I usually refrain from posting anything overtly radiological as it seems too much like work. So this series is not going to be exhaustively informative or educative. I would suggest places like this and this for more information on colorectal cancers for health professionals and patients who stumble in here from search engines. It is just a series of images on CT scan in the diagnosis, staging and therapeutic follow-up of colorectal cancers. I had prepared a set of images from my collection for a talk that I had to give to general practitioners on the utility of CT in large bowel disease. By ‘prepared’ I mean I had selected representative images and annotated them to show the abnormality to laymen. That, if you noticed, was typical radiological snobbery. We consider all non-radiologists to be lay people.

CT Scan in Colorectal Cancer - Caecum

Coronal reformatted CT image showing air distended large bowel and a polypoidal mass in the Caecum (black arrow).

The following two images show the same mass, which turned out on biopsy to be an adenocarcinoma, in other coronal planes (yellow arrow and arrowheads). These images show iodinated oral contrast in the small bowel and intravenous contrast enhancement of the blood vessels including the Aorta which is tortuous.

For further information on colorectal cancers:

US National Cancer Institute’s Colon and Rectal Cancer Home Page and this online booklet for patients.

Mayo Clinic’s Colon Cancer Page.

Other posts in this series:

• CT in Colorectal Cancer - 2
• CT in Colorectal Cancer - 3
• CT in Colorectal Cancer - 4
• CT in Colorectal Cancer - 5
• CT in Colorectal Cancer - 6

Tags: colorectal cancer, Computed Tomography

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