A framework for the design of a closed-loop gastric pacemaker for treating conduction block

Abstract

Background and Objective: Gastrointestinal (GI) motility disorders can be significantly detrimental to the quality of life. Pacing, or long pulse gastric electrical stimulation, is a potential treatment option for treating GI motility disorders by modulating the slow wave activity. Open-loop pacing of the GI tract is the current standard for modulating dysrhythmic patterns, but it is known to be suboptimal and inefficient. Recent work on sensing intracellular potentials and pacing accordingly in a closed-loop has been shown to be effective at modulating dysrhythmic patterns. However, capturing intracellular potentials in an in-vivo setting is not viable. Therefore a closed-loop gastric electrical stimulation that can sense extracellular potentials and pace accordingly to modulate dysrhythmic patterns is required. This paper presents a closed-loop Gastric Electrical Stimulator (GES) design framework, which comprises of extracellular potential generation, sensing, and closed-loop actuation. Methods: This work leverages a pre-existing high-fidelity two-dimensional Interstitial Cells of Cajal (ICC) network modeling framework to mimic several normal and dysrhythmic patterns observed in experimental recordings of patients suffering from GI tract diseases. The activation patterns of the of the ICC network are captured by an extracellular potential generation model and is integrated with the GES in a closed-loop to validate the efficacy of the developed pacing algorithms. The proposed GES pacing algorithms extend existing offline filtering and activation detection methods to process the sensed extracellular potentials in real time. The GES detects bradygastric rhythms based on the sensed extracellular potentials and actuates the ICC network via pacing to rectify dysrhythmic patterns. Results: The proposed GES model is able to sense and process the generated noisy extracellular potentials, detect the bradygastric patterns, and modulate the slow wave activities to normal propagation effectively. Conclusions: A closed-loop GES design, which can be applied in an experimental and clinical setting is developed and validated through the ICC network model. The proposed GES model has the ability to modulate a variety of bradygastric patterns, including conduction block effectively in a closed-loop.