About the ManoBank

The ManoBank is an interactive archive of gastrointestinal motility data consisting primarily of manometric and impedance studies of the esophagus and pharynx as well as anorectal pressure studies. The principle of the ManoBank is simple; users may archive motility data in the bank which will be classified by several criteria as well as extract data from the bank that meet some criteria.

For example, a researcher may have a data set of high resolution manometric studies of a specific disease group for which hypotheses regarding comparisons to age and sex-matched healthy subjects need to be tested. The ManoBank provides the researcher with a searchable, databased archive of studies from healthy subjects that may be downloaded to the researcher’s lab for analyses and hypothesis testing thereby saving the user the time and labor of collecting the healthy subject data themselves.

Advantages

The advantages of a broad archive of motility data are manifold. Possible uses of such a database of healthy subject as well as patient data include (but are not limited to):

  1. Determine characteristic values of accepted metrics of motility
    1. Esophageal
      1. Distal contractile integral
      2. Integrated relaxation pressure
      3. Peak peristaltic amplitudes
    2. Pharyngeal
      1. Pharyngeal contractile integral
      2. Peak pharyngeal pressures
  2. Determine characteristics of pressure and/or impedance isocontours under experimental or clinical conditions
    1. Volume effects
    2. Age effects
    3. Sex effects
    4. Disease effects

To perform hypothesis testing against normative values as well as between conditions or disease states, large sample sizes are needed due to the substantial within- and between-subject variability of high resolution manometric and impedance data. Thus, our proposed ManoBank will require large numbers of studies to have relevance as a platform for research or clinical comparisons. To realize accumulating such large numbers, it is unlikely that a single lab could generate the number of needed studies; therefore, the collection of ManoBank data is inherently an exercise in cooperation among many contributors.