Figure 2.

The stomach and the generation of the gastric slow rhythm. (a) Anatomical regions of the stomach, with the main divisions into fundus, corpus, and antrum. The gastric rhythm originates from the pacemaker region (orange) near the greater curvature of the mid/upper corpus. From here, it entrains other pacemaker cells, resulting in traveling rings of electrical wavefronts in the direction of the antrum (O’Grady et al., 2010). (b) The Interstitial Cells of Cajal (ICC, blue) are the generators of the gastric rhythm. They lay in the stomach wall, between and within the circular and longitudinal muscle layers. An additional thin oblique muscle layer located in the innermost part of the stomach, adjacent to the circular layer, is not represented here. The electrical activity of the pacemaker is passed through the entire ICC network and is also passively conducted into coupled muscle cells. ICCs make synapse‐like contact with vagal sensory neurons (Powley et al., 2008), presented in green, in a structure known as intramuscular arrays, that can detect mechanical changes in smooth muscles. Adapted from Koch & Stern, 2004