Design of Diagnostic System for Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders

Digestive system is one of the most important systems, which plays major role for the normal function of human body. A large percentage of population around the world suffers with several digestive system disorders. Several efficient methods exist to diagnose them. In this paper, an alternative method named Electrogastrogram (EGG) is proposed. The proposed EGG method is a non-invasive, cheap and painless method that detects the electrical signal from the stomach cutaneously. The signal characteristic of gastric electrical activity for a normal human being is 3 cycles per minute (cpm). Whenever there is a variation with respect to this value, it causes abnormalities in the stomach. The raw gastric electrical signal contains impulsive noise. Hence to diagnose the disorder, it needs to be processed. In the proposed EGG method, instrumentation amplifier is used to increase the gain of the signal and second order Butter worth low pass filter is used to remove the noise in the signal. The power spectral density of processed signal is estimated using Welch and Thomson multi-taper methods. Based on the power values, the kind of disease is diagnosed.