Pulse Synchronization of Intestinal Myoelectrical Models

Electrical stimulation of the stomach and small intestine in animals has been shown to give a "pacing" effect, whereby the normal frequency of the myoelectrical slow-waves can be altered to that of the pulse stimulus if it has a frequency close to that of the natural rhythm. In this paper the effect of pulse stimulation on three different types of models used for gastrointestinal studies is investigated. Each of the models is an electronic implementation comprising coupled oscillators, where the unit oscillators are either based on van der Pol's equation, Hodgkin-Huxley type equations, or a relaxation switching circuit. The synchronization range is investigated for each model for variations in stimulus pulse height and width. The effect of the number of oscillators in a chain, the waveshape of the individual oscillators, and the coupling between oscillators are also studied. It is shown that the relaxation model has different synchronization characteristics than the other two models. These differences are that a weakly coupled system is easier to synchronize than a strongly coupled system, that increasing pulsewidth does not always increase the pacing band, phase lead cannot be induced, and the synchronization-band can be entirely above the unpaced system frequency.