Towards evidence based emergency medicine: best BETs from the Manchester Royal Infirmary. Computed tomography for small bowel obstruction.

A short cut review was carried out to establish whether computed tomography (CT) is useful in the management of patients with suspected acute small bowel obstruction (SBO). A total of 348 papers were found using the reported search and manually cross referencing papers, of which 16 represented the best evidence to answer the clinical question. The author, date and country of publication, patient group studied, study type, relevant outcomes, results, and study weaknesses of these best papers are presented in table 3. The clinical bottom line is that CT is a useful investigation in patients presenting with suspected SBO.