Measurement of Liquid Volume in Stomach using 6-Elctorde FIM for Saline Water Intake at Periodic Intervals
Focused Impedance Measurement (FIM) is a relatively new technique developed in the Biomedical Physics Laboratory of Dhaka University which allows improved localization of a zone without much increase in complexity of the measuring instrumentation when the electrodes are applied on the skin surface with the organs inside contributing the measurement of impedance since the body is a volume conductor. The present work is basically a preliminary study which aims at measuring the absolute volume of food or drinks of known conductivity inside a human stomach. The circuitry of a FIM system was used to study the impedance change in the stomach region of two subjects for the intake of saline (water with a little salt) with a particular conductivity on several days, each day with a different volume of the saline. It was ensured that they had the same history of food intake in the previous day and all physical conditions remain the same during the measurement for reproducibility. The impedance changes for different volumes of the saline in the one subject agreed well, and it appears that provided the correction factors mentioned above are incorporated, FIM may be used to measure the volume of food or saline in the stomach of a person.
