A new approach to analysis and modeling of esophageal manometry data in humans

In this paper, we propose a new approach to the analysis and modeling of esophageal manometry (EGM) data to assist the diagnosis of esophageal motility disorders in humans. The proposed approach combines three techniques, namely, wavelet decomposition (WD), nonlinear pulse detection technique (NPDT), and statistical pulse modeling. Specifically, WD is applied to the filtering of the EGM data, which is contaminated with electrocardiography (ECG) artifacts. A new NPDT is applied to the denoised data leading to identification and extraction of diagnostically important information, i.e., esophageal pulses from the respiration artifacts. Such information is used to generate a statistical model that can classify the EGM patterns. The proposed approach is computationally effortless, thus making it suitable for real-time application. Experimental results using measured EGM data of 20 patients, including ten abnormal cases is presented. Comparison of our results with those from existing techniques illustrates the advantages of the proposed approach in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Index Terms--Esophageal manometry, nonlinear pulse detection, statistical pulse modeling, wavelet decomposition.