An improvement of normogastric rhythm extraction from electrogastrographic (EGG) signal using independent component analysis

Electrogastrographic signal (EGG) is considered to be one of the less interesting from both registration and interpretation point of view. There are several reasons of that two facts. EGG presents gastric myoelectrical activity measured by several electrodes attached on the abdomen. Unfortunately the registration procedure does not deliver a pure signal as EGG is usually associated with some interferences caused by the other organs localized near stomach. On the other hand however there are no databases available, which could allow both comparison and proper interpretation. One of the parameter, among others, which is analyzed owing to proper registration is so called normogastric rhythm, which should cover around 70% of rhythmic behavior of the signal. Proper extraction of the normogastric rhythm is a subject of this paper. Special signal preprocessing steps should be applied before the main tool i.e. independent component analysis (ICA) is applied for normogastric rhythm extraction. Also, to make this analysis possible a special registration procedure has been applied concerning two phases of registration - one with feeding and the other one without with 5 minutes brake between them.