Role of nuclear medicine in evaluating patients with suspected gastrointestinal motility disorders.

Functional symptoms caused by gastrointestinal motility disorders are relatively common in the general population. Knowledge of the relationship between symptoms and the underlying gastrointestinal dysmotility provides physicians with a framework for successful evaluation and treatment of patients with possible motor disorders of the gastrointestinal tract. Scintigraphy provides for noninvasive and quantitative assessment of physiological transit throughout the gastrointestinal tract, and it is extremely useful for diagnosing gastrointestinal motor dysfunction. The wide range of scintigraphic studies now available supplement other diagnostic tests for evaluation of all segments of the gastrointestinal tract.