Anatomical variations of the stomach effects on electrogastrography

Routine screening and accurate diagnosis of chronic gastrointestinal motility disorders represents a significant problem in current clinical practice. Electrogastrography (EGG) provides a non-invasive option for assessing gastric slow waves, as a means of diagnosing gastric dysrhythmias. However, its uptake in motility practice has been limited partly due to an incomplete description of how the underlying gastric slow waves directly relate to EGG. This study aims to quantify the effects of various anatomical orientations of the stomach on EGG using a multiscale model of whole-organ slow wave activation and EGG. The orientation of the stomach was perturbed over six parameters: x, y, z translations and rotations. The perturbed simulations were compared to the original simulated model using root-mean-squared (RMS) errors and correlation coefficients. Simulations demonstrated that the perturbations had minimal influence on EGG, however channels located within close proximity of the stomach source were subject to large variation as a result of the perturbations. The results indicate that outside a critical area the effects of translation/rotation have minimal influence on the EGG, and thus beyond this critical area findings should be relatively comparable across patient groups. These findings show promise in advancing rational development of improved EGG methods towards a normative methodology and the formation of a normative database.