Signal reconstruction of the slow wave and spike potential from electrogastrogram

The gastric slow wave and the spike potential can correspondingly represent the rhythm and the intensity of stomach motility. Because of the filtering effect of biological tissue, electrogastrogram (EGG) cannot measure the spike potential on the abdominal surface in the time domain. Thus, currently the parameters of EGG adopted by clinical applications are only the characteristics of the slow wave, such as the dominant frequency, the dominant power and the instability coefficients. The limitation of excluding the spike potential analyses hinders EGG from being a diagnosis to comprehensively reveal the motility status of the stomach. To overcome this defect, this paper a) presents an EGG reconstruction method utilizing the specified signal components decomposed by the discrete wavelet packet transform, and b) obtains a frequency band for the human gastric spike potential through fasting and postprandial cutaneous EGG experiments for twenty-five human volunteers. The results indicate the lower bound of the human gastric spike potential frequency is 0.96±0.20 Hz (58±12 cpm), and the upper bound is 1.17±0.23 Hz (70±14 cpm), both of which have not been reported before to the best of our knowledge. As an auxiliary validation of the proposed method, synchronous serosa-surface EGG acquisitions are carried out for two dogs. The frequency band results for the gastric spike potential of the two dogs are respectively 0.83-0.90 Hz (50-54 cpm) and 1.05-1.32 Hz (63-79 cpm). They lie in the reference range 50-80 cpm proposed in previous literature, showing the feasibility of the reconstruction method in this paper.