Chaos in coupled nonlinear gastric oscillators

Gastric motility disorders may manifest themselves as disorders in the frequency of the electrical oscillations in gastric smooth muscle, resulting in seemingly-random signals. Recent developments in Chaos Theory show that models of dynamic systems consisting of only a few parameters will display this seemingly-random behaviour. We present a computer model capable of producing the irregular as well as the normal gastric electrical activity. Analysis of the output using Lyapunov exponent techniques confirmed the presence of chaos in the model for some parameter values.