Noninvasive assessment of gastric acid secretion in man. Application of electrical impedance tomography (EIT)

Electrical impedance tomography (EIT) is a tubeless technique that generates tomographic images of gastric resistivity. We investigated the application of EIT to measure gastric acid secretion. Nineteen normal subjects underwent a standard intubation test. Basal acid output (BAO) and stimulated acid output (SAO) (millimoles per hour) were measured before and after pentagastrin, respectively. On a different day, EIT was performed before (basal) and after pentagastrin (stimulated). The changes in impedance over time were measured and the area under the curve (AUC) was calculated. Both the tests were repeated in 13 subjects after omeprazole treatment. As in the intubation test, there was the expected increase in AUC value after pentagastrin (basal vs stimulated; 1.2 +/- 2.8 vs 731 +/- 297, P < 0.0001). A significant fall in acid output and AUC following omeprazole pretreatment was observed (without vs with omeprazole; 20.5 +/- 5.7 vs 0.03 +/- 0.06, P < 0.0001 for intubation test and 731 +/- 297 vs 44 +/- 172, P < 0.0001 for EIT). There was a significant correlation between SAO and the delta AUC with (r = 0.65 P < 0.001) or without (r = 0.95, P < 0.001) omeprazole and in all the experiments (r = 0.87, P < 0.001). This study demonstrates the predictable change of gastric impedance and may be useful as a noninvasive test for measuring gastric acid secretion.