A 59-Year-Old Female Presenting With Bloating and Flatulence: Is the Intestinal Gas Volume in Plain Abdominal Radiographs Correlated With Symptoms?

CC This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Figure 1. The plain abdominal ra-diograph shows a moderate amount of intestinal gas (A), which has decreased after treatment with an antibiotic (C). The gas volume score (GVS) is measured in the plain abdominal radio-graph using imaging software (B, D). The black area shows bowel gas and the black border is the abdominal background. The GVS is calculated as the area of bowel gas divided by the area of background. The GVS decreased from 0.131 (B) to 0.049 (D) following treatment with antibiotic. A 59-year-old woman with bloating and flatulence for 6 months visited to our hospital. Her symptoms did not improve after treatment with antiflatulents, prokinetics and probiotics. A plain abdominal radiograph showed a moderate amount of intestinal gas (Fig. 1A). The intestinal gas volume was measured in the plain radiograph using the imaging software Image-pro Plus Ⓡ