Comparison of the Ability of Various Imaging Modalities (CT & Plain X- Ray) in Detecting Drug Transport in Body Packers

"ndrugs within the human body. In our country due to vast common border with Afghanistan which is the biggest Opium producer in the world and has the second place in Heroine production, drug smuggling has potential national threat and besides it has a global impact as using our territory as the major smuggling route to the west. Furthermore, in recent years new generations of African smugglers of new types of drugs are using our country as a transit route to transport drugs to Europe or Africa. In this way handmade or automatically produced packets are swallowed, rectally or vaginally inserted, and then transported. The first choice modality is plain x-ray of the abdomen in upright and supine positions. Recently abdominal and pelvic CT without contrast has shown a great success rate in the detection of body packers with changing window modality to detect different types of drugs. "nMaterials and Methods: Plain x-ray and abdominal and pelvic CT without contrast were performed for 12 cases who confessed to drug packet ingestion. The presence, number and location of the packets were evaluated in different modalities and the density of the packets were also measured in Hounsfield units (HU). "nResults: The mean age of our cases was 28.2±5.9 years (range, 17-35 years). Eleven (91.6 %) patients were male and only one case was female. All patients had characteristic findings in plain x-ray and also all packets were visualized in all patients "nConclusion: Plain x-ray has a distinctive position in detecting packets in intestines especially when oral contrast materials are used. It is cheaper and more accessible than CT, but using different Hounsfield units in CT windows can even characterize different types of drugs even before extracting them.