What Your bowel Sounds Can Tell: The Hidden Language of Digestive Health

Abstract Purpose While bowel sound auscultation represents a key component of abdominal examination, its utility is limited because bowel sounds (BS) are intermittent, variable, and influenced by factors such as diet and digestive state. This renders it challenging to use them for a quantitative assessment of gastrointestinal health. Methods BS signals were recorded from 84 subjects (39 patients and 45 healthy controls) using an acoustic SonicGuard sensor and categorized into four patterns. Metadata on physiological parameters were collected to examine their influence on BS characteristics and the differences between healthy and patient BS patterns. Results Bowel sound patterns are significantly influenced by meal timing, caffeine consumption, and medication intake. Significant differences between healthy and patient groups were also observed in sound count, duration, energy, and waveform shape. These differences were mirrored in the performance of machine learning models finetuned for BS patterns classification, with performance depending on the group used for training and evaluation. Conclusion BS patterns present a promising quantitative indicators of gas-trointestinal health when analyzed alongside relevant physiological parameters.