Spatiotemporal Mapping Techniques for Quantifying Gut Motility

We review current methods for the spatiotemporal (ST) mapping of phasic and tonic contractile activity in the various components of the intestinal tract. Basic mapping techniques extract the movement of gut organ boundaries from a sequence of images and condense this information into 2D maps. More complex techniques determine the extent to which locations on the gut organ are lengthening or shortening in a particular direction and also present this data in a 2D map. The latter either track the position of applied markers or use cross-correlation of consecutive images to quantify the movement of serosal patterns. In situations where the above techniques have difficulties, intensity mapping can be useful for identifying motility patterns but is less quantitative. Finally, we discuss ancillary methods for deriving further information from ST maps and practical considerations for applying the mapping techniques.