Analysis of gastric myoelectrical activity from the electrogastrogram signals based on wavelet transform and line length feature

Abstract

Electrogastrogram is used for the abdominal surface measurement of the gastric electrical activity of the human stomach. The electrogastrogram technique has significant value as a clinical tool because careful electrogastrogram signal recordings and analyses play a major role in determining the propagation and coordination of gastric myoelectric abnormalities. The aim of this article is to evaluate electrogastrogram features calculated by line length features based on the discrete wavelet transform method to differentiate healthy control subjects from patients with functional dyspepsia and diabetic gastroparesis. For this analysis, the discrete wavelet transform method was used to extract electrogastrogram signal characteristics. Next, line length features were calculated for each sub-signal, which reflect the waveform dimensionality variations and represent a measure of sensitivity to differences in signal amplitude and frequency. The analysis was carried out using a statistical analysis of variance test. The results obtained from the line length analysis of the electrogastrogram signal prove that there are significant differences among the functional dyspepsia, diabetic gastroparesis, and control groups. The electrogastrogram signals of the control subjects had a significantly higher line length than those of the functional dyspepsia and diabetic gastroparesis patients. In conclusion, this article provides new methods with increased accuracy obtained from electrogastrogram signal analysis. The electrogastrography is an effective and non-stationary method to differentiate diabetic gastroparesis and functional dyspepsia patients from the control group. The proposed method can be considered a key test and an essential computer-aided diagnostic tool for detecting gastric myoelectric abnormalities in diabetic gastroparesis and functional dyspepsia patients.