Oral ⁶⁷Gallium Citrate Scintigraphy in assessment of inflammatory activity of Crohn’s disease: methodological issues on accuracy and agreement

Excerpt

I was interested to read the papers by Tajra JBM and colleagues entitled “Accuracy of Oral ⁶⁷Gallium Citrate Scintigraphy in assessment of inflammatory activity of Crohn’s disease” published in Apr 2020 issue of Ann Nucl Med. Crohn’s disease (CD) is a sustained suppression of inflammatory activity associated with mucosa healing in endoscopic evaluation. During clinical routine, there are small numbers of good markers to monitor inflammatory activity under treatment. The authors aimed to measure the accuracy of Oral ⁶⁷Gallium Citrate Scintigraphy in intestinal inflammatory activity of Crohn’s disease [1]. The ileocolonic region of 32 patients with CD were studied by dividing it into four regions of interest (ROI) from the ileum to the rectum. Accuracy values of Oral ⁶⁷Gallium Scintigraphy and colonoscopy tests were evaluated with the histological reference test. The reliability between the tests was evaluated by Kappa. They reported that the sensitivity of scintigraphy to detect intestinal inflammatory activity in CD was 64%, specificity of 96%, positive predictive value (PPV) of 91%, negative predictive value (NPV) of 81% and accuracy of 84%. A high agreement was found between oral scintigraphy and histological measurements with kappa = 0.64. They concluded that oral ⁶⁷Ga scintigraphy had similar accuracy and agreement compared to colonoscopy in the identification of inflammatory activity in Crohn’s Disease. …