Some early results related to electrical impedance of normal and abnormal gastric tissue

Abstract

Gastric cancer is the fourth most common cancer and most patients with gastric cancer are being diagnosed in advanced stages of the disease so they do not gain any survival chance from conventional surgical, chemotherapeutic or radiotherapeutic methods. These are relatively high cost procedures in terms of both time and money. This study considers the introduction of a novel minimally invasive diagnostic technique which shows the relationship between histopathology and the electrical impedance spectrum in the human stomach. In this study, 4 electrode technique was used to differentiate tissues from each other using Tabriz Mark 1 electrical impedance system (30 different frequencies in the range of 2 kHz to 1 MHz). A total of 97 points from 45 patients were studied in terms of their biopsy reports matching to the electrical impedance measurements (in vivo). After impedance measurements and applying calibration factors, a non-parametric statistical technique, the Kruskal-Wallis test was used to evaluate the difference among the groups. According to the calculation of respective data using this spectroscopy system, the resistivity of the normal group was higher than that of the benign group, and the resistivity of these groups were higher than that of the malignant group at frequencies between 470 kHz and 1 MHz (P < 0.05). In these frequencies, the impedivity of the dysplastic tissue was significantly lower than that of the other groups (P < 0.05). Also, Cole equation fitting procedure was used to generate a scatter plot of the malignant and benign points: it shows in general, benign points had higher values of R than the malignant points. Therefore, electrical impedance spectroscopy can be a useful technique to characterize the stomach tissue. © 2011 Associazione Italiana di Fisica Medica.