Electrogastrography. Evolution and clinical applications

Electrogastrography (EGG) is a non invasive technique of recording gastric myoelectrical activity by cutaneous electrodes. Although first reported about 70 years ago, the development of this methodology has been very slow, mainly because of several shortcomings in data acquisition, interpretation of EGG data and poor correlation with the antral contractile activity. Recently, EGG has received increasing interest and technical improvements. The better quality of the signal obtained and the applications with automated signal processing, have improved the interpretation of the EGG. For this reasons, the number of EGG applications, both experimental and clinical, has rapidly increased. However, the lack of invasivity of this methodology has suggested some clinical applications which probably exceeded the specific possibility of the EGG. We aimed in this study at analysing several parameters, whose clinical relevance is not clearly understood, obtained by the automatic analysis, to identify patients with gastric electrical abnormalities between 10 patients with abnormal gastric emptying and 10 healthy controls. The best separation between these two groups was obtained by combining both mean dominant frequency and power.