• colonoscopia
• preparazione dell'intestino
• ultrasuoni
• getti d'acqua ad alta pressione

One of the main challenges with the conventional colonoscopy is bowel cleansing before the examination. Despite the variety of methods available, incomplete bowel preparation is reported in up to 20% of patients, resulting in aborted procedures in 6%. In fact the current cleansing agents on the market, including generally polyethylene glycol solutions, oral sodium phosphate and stimulants often result inconvenient, unpleasant and intolerable for the patient, causing abdominal cramping, nausea, vomiting, electrolyte imbalance and renal failure. Moreover an imperfect preparation impacts negatively on the diagnostic accuracy, compromising the visualization of the colonic mucosa and the detection of polyps and lesions. Consequently it can lead to prolonged procedure time and the repetition of the exam at earlier intervals, raising costs by 12% to 22% due to aborted examination. It would, therefore, be necessary to provide a novel method that overcomes the undesirable effects of the traditional cleansing.
The aim of this thesis was to investigate alternative strategies to cleanse the large intestine prior to colonoscopy.