Role of computed tomographic colonography in a regional colorectal cancer screening program

The majority of developed countries has planned different screening programs to detect pre-neoplastic lesions or early colorectal cancer due to decrease disease’ incidence and colorectal cancer morbidity and mortality. Optical colonoscopy (OC) is currently the gold standard examination for diagnosis and treatment of pre-neoplastic lesions or early cancer and it is routinely performed as day surgery procedure with very low controindications and adverse effects). Computed tomographic colonography (CTC) is a relatively new colorectal screening test that has been validated for colorectal cancer screening from different studies and is widely considered an reliable alternative to the OC due to its high accuracy for detecting adenomatous polyps and colorectal cancer. For this reason CTC can be utilized as a screening test in patients who refused OC, or could not perform it for severe comorbidities, or in patients with incomplete OC. The aim of this study is to evaluate the role of CTC as first diagnostic colonic examination in screening patients with positive fecal immunochemical test (FIT), with contraindications to OC, incomplete OC, or those who refuse an OC.