Multichannel intra-luminal impedance signals variability during gastro-oesophageal activities.

Multichannel intra-luminal impedance (MII) technique has been proven to be a successful diagnostic tool in detecting and displaying activities inside the oesophagus. It improves the diagnostic capability of oesophageal disorders since it gives accurate and more in-depth information about the activities inside the oesophagus, especially reflux episodes. A comparison is presented between normal and abnormal adults in terms of variability in MII signals during baselines and reflux episodes. A comparative study of episode duration for normal and abnormal subjects is presented. The characteristics of MII signals during gastro-oesophageal reflux episodes as well as during baselines are investigated. These characteristics show different responses between normal and abnormal individuals which help improving MII analysis capability in evaluating patients with gastro-oesophageal reflux disease and enhances the automatic detection of the oesophageal activities. Baselines from normal and abnormal samples were fitted to gamma distributions as a trial to distinguish between normal and abnormal samples.