Review of small-bowel cleansing scales in capsule endoscopy: A panoply of choices.

Evaluation of the quality of small-bowel cleansing is required to assess the reliability of findings in capsule endoscopy (CE). Moreover, consensus regarding the need of intestinal preparation for CE remains to be achieved. The presence of multiple grading scales for small-bowel preparation in CE, which are time-consuming and complicated, adds difficulty to the comparison of different small-bowel cleansing regimens and their application in clinical practice. Nowadays, a validated scale universally accepted for grading small-bowel cleansing is lacking. In fact, there are numerous grading systems with very different technical characteristics, namely, the parameters and the portion of the CE video that are analyzed, the objectivity of the analysis, the lesser or greater dependency on the operator, and the validation of the score. The authors performed a review which aims to systematize and summarize currently available small-bowel grading scales in CE.