Combined method for artifact reduction in surface electroenterogram

Surface electroenterogram (EEnG) is a non-invasive method for monitoring the intestinal motility. However, surface EEnG recordings are contaminated by movement artifact, cardiac activity, respiratory artifact and other interferences. The aim of this work is to remove movement artifacts by means of a combined method of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and independent component analysis (ICA). Four recording sessions were conducted on canine model. Surface signals from 4 different channels are decomposed using EMD. Resulting intrinsic mode functions are the inputs of ICA analysis which permits to separate and identify the activities of different origin. Signal components associated to movement artifacts are removed and the original signals are reconstructed by means of an inverse procedure. The results show that the proposed method allows extracting and cancelling movement artifacts from surface EEnG, avoiding the presence of irregular peaks in external intestinal motility indexes. Therefore, the proposed method could be useful to reduce artifacts in EEnG recording and to provide more robust non-invasive intestinal motility indicators.