A pattern-analysis methodology for esophageal motility records.
The features of the esophageal contractile activity recorded during swallowing have been investigated using a signal-processing approach. Data of a 10 min recording taken from 10 normal subjects have been examined. The final features of each peristaltic wave are a set of parameters comprising the locations and magnitudes of the local wavelets contributing to the peristaltic. The approach is based on an inverse filtering technique. The inverse filter, designed with a knowledge of an average peristaltic profile formed by coherent averaging of many peristaltic examples aligned to their maxima, is used to refine the process of locating the local wavelets. It is shown that the inferred wavelet structure offers a good basis for modelling the different peristaltics, and that it suggests new parameters for esophageal characterization and classification procedures.