Abstract
In animals' intestines, it is often seen such a movement that the intestine is rhythmically segmented into many vesicles by short constrictions, which is called rhythmic segmentation. In spite that the rhythmic segmentation is very important for digestion of foods, there are few researches reported on this movement.
This paper describes a biomechanical study on mechanism of the rhythmic segmentation. Firstly, an animal experiment is performed by an abdominal window method which enables to observe in vivo the intestinal movements. Secondly, experimental data were analyzed by a new method which presents the rhythmic segmentation as a contraction pattern on a plane. As a result of this analysis, it is proved that the neural mechanism of rhythmic segmentation includes some partial neural mechanism which are common with that of peristalsis. Thirdly, a neural network model for rhythmic segmentation is proposed. And finally, the behavior of the model is simulated on a digital computer. The simulation results show that the model generates a similar contraction pattern of the rhythmic segmentation to the one obtained from the animal experiment.
