Acknowledgment of characteristic bowel necrosis CT findings is crucial for determining the therapeutic attitude and the use of previous CT scans to compare the SMA diameter may help the radiologist to achieve an early diagnosis of NOMI in an often critically ill patient population. Advances in knowledge: Diagnosis of NOMI can be difficult in cases of partial mural ischaemia, thus objective data (diameter of the SMA) should be useful for the radiologist to include NOMI as the first diagnostic option in the differential diagnosis.