Measurement of gastric emptying by intragastric gamma scintigraphy

Gastric emptying is usually measured in animals and humans by dilution/sampling or external scintigraphy. These methods are either time consuming or require expensive equipment. The capacity of a miniature gamma counter positioned in the stomach to measure emptying of liquid and solid meals was evaluated. In eight conscious pigs fitted with gastric and duodenal cannulae, gastric emptying of saline (500 mL), dextrose (20%, 500 mL), porridge (300 g) and scrambled eggs (300 g), all labelled with 3.5 MBq 99mTc, was evaluated. When positioned in the antrum the probe was unable to quantify gastric emptying. In contrast, measurements of the fractional emptying of saline over 4‐min periods by the probe positioned in the corpus and quantification of radioactivity in the duodenal effluent correlated closely (r = 0.88, P