This means that twenty-some feet—greater than the length of your car—of small bowel between the duodenum and cecum cannot be visualized. This has proven to be a perennial problem in pinpointing, for instance, a source of bleeding from the small bowel, which could be a leaking two-millimeter blood vessel twelve feet down from the duodenum, twelve feet up from the cecum, and completely inaccessible to a scope.
