3D-Display of Peristaltic Waves

Click here for an explanation of the space-time display of swallow waves in the human esophagus. The data on this page were recorded by Werner Schwizer, Mark Fox, Heiko Frühauf, Bernadette Stutz and Monika Kwiatek at the Department of Gastroenterology of the UniversitätsSpital Zürich and Klinik Stephanshorn. The interactive display was created with JavaView; thanks to Konrad Polthier.

Javascript is not enabled in your browser. Please enable Javascript to allow for selection of other swallows.

Dragging with the left mouse button pressed rotates the display. The image will resize to your window extension after the first run. To rotate or rescale the figure, see table below.

Under Firefox this application hangs after 5 selected swallows because of a memory leak, that is attributed to the Java plugin of Firefox. It works under earlier version of Firefox, and all versions of IE, Opera and Safari; Java source is available on request if someone wants find out what is wrong. If you only see a gray rectangle, please download and install Java from Sun. If nothing appears with Firefox 1.5 and AdBlock enabled, please update or disable AdBlock. This trick helped me after removing Microsoft Java VM.

Handling the 3D-Display

Mouse Action           Key Action
Left Rotate   w Auto Rotate; repeats the last mouse-move action.
Right Menu   q Stop Auto Rotate
      o Rotate surface (default mode)
      s Scale surface, drag in vertical direction
      t Translate surface in viewing plane
      r Reset camera and display
      F1 Show control window

Swallow Phases Explained

All swallows were recorded in healthy volunteers in a clinically controlled study.

Phase What it means
Water Supine Swallow induced by 10 ml water in supine position
Water Seated 10 ml water, seated position
Spont Supine Spontaneous swallow in supine position

Spont Seated

 Spontaneous swallow in seated position
Barium A sip of water with barium-sulphate, a contrast agent used to clearly mark the bolus in x-ray fluoroscopy
Marshmallow A delicate marshmallow with a sip of barium as a model of a bolus that is difficult to swallow.