Abstract

Gastrointestinal (GI) problems give rise to 10 percent of initial patient visits to their physician. Although blockages and infections are easy to diagnose, more than half of GI disorders involve abnormal functioning of the GI tract, where diagnosis entails subjective symptom-based questionnaires or objective but invasive, intermittent procedures in specialized centers. Although common procedures capture motor aspects of gastric function, which do not correlate with symptoms or treatment response, recent findings with invasive electrical recordings show that spatiotemporal patterns of the gastric slow wave are associated with diagnosis, symptoms, and treatment response. We here consider developing non-invasive approaches to extract this information. Using CT scans from human subjects, we simulate normative and disordered gastric surface electrical activity along with associated abdominal activity. We employ Bayesian inference to solve the ill-posed inverse problem of estimating gastric surface activity from cutaneous recordings. We utilize a prior distribution on the spatiotemporal activity pertaining to sparsity in the number of wavefronts on the stomach surface, and smooth evolution of these wavefronts across time. We implement an efficient procedure to construct the Bayes optimal estimate and demonstrate its superiority compared to other commonly used inverse methods, for both normal and disordered gastric activity. Region-specific wave direction information is calculated and consistent with the simulated normative and disordered cases. We apply these methods to cutaneous multi-electrode recordings of two human subjects with the same clinical description of motor function, but different diagnosis of underlying cause. Our method finds statistically significant wave propagation in all stomach regions for both subjects, anterograde activity throughout for the subject with diabetic gastroparesis, and retrograde activity in some regions for the subject with idiopathic gastroparesis. These findings provide a further step towards towards non-invasive phenotyping of gastric function and indicate the long-term potential for enabling population health opportunities with objective GI assessment.

Highlights

  • Gastrointestinal (GI) problems are the second leading cause for missing work or school in the US [1], giving rise to 10% of the reasons a patient visits their physician, and costing $142 billion annually [2]

  • We developed models of normal and abnormal gastric slow wave electrical activity using a solution to a one-dimensional (1D) wave equation

  • We provide the 3D results on the geometry as well as a time/space representation of the surface electrical potentials

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Summary

Introduction

Gastrointestinal (GI) problems are the second leading cause for missing work or school in the US [1], giving rise to 10% of the reasons a patient visits their physician, and costing $142 billion annually [2]. While pathologic findings can be detected with a blood test, endoscopy, or imaging, oftentimes symptoms cannot be attributed to a medical condition despite appropriate workup. These disorders fall under the umbrella of functional and motility GI disorders such as Functional dyspepsia and gastroparesis (which affects Parkinson’s and diabetes patients [3, 4]). These disorders make up a majority of patient referrals to GI specialists. The NIH Gastroparesis Consortium has recently recommended that improvement in gastric emptying not be considered a requirement for clinical drug trials in gastroparesis [5]

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