ABSTRACT
Spatiotemporal parameters of gastric electrical control activity such as its amplitude, direction and propagation velocity are physiological parameters of distinctive clinical interest due to their potential use for differentiating between the healthy and diseased states of the human stomach. Whereas their time evolution is relatively well behaved in the case of healthy subjects, significant deviations from normal have been observed in patients suffering from a number of gastric diseases such as gastroparesis and gastropathy. For this reason, monitoring ECA parameters noninvasively may offer a useful test for the presence of such diseases whose diagnosis remains problematic. Here, we describe a method for computing ECA direction and orientation from simultaneous, noninvasive magnetogastrographic (MGG) and electrogastrographic (EGG) recordings. We demonstrate how independent component analysis and standard frequency analysis methods can be used to predict the locations and orientations of gastric current dipoles from MGG/EGG data. We compare our MGG-based dipole parameters to analogous ones obtained from simultaneous EGG recordings within the experimental framework of a human model. We find that magnetic recordings are superior in their ability to portray the underlying physiology of the stomach.
