Automated bowel sounds analysis in clinical practice: A review of technologies

Bowel sound analysis possesses significant diagnostic potential for gastrointestinal assessment yet clinical utility is minimal due to the subjectivity and inconsistency of traditional auscultation methods. This review examines the emerging field of automated bowel sound analysis focusing on its technological advancements, clinical applications, and diagnostic potential. A literature review adhering to PRISMA guidelines identified 56 relevant studies that explored hardware and software variations in signal acquisition and processing of bowel sound in a wide range of clinical settings. In the acute setting automated bowel sound analysis can potentiate early diagnosis of intestinal obstruction and risk stratify post-operative ileus. In chronic conditions long term bowel sound analysis can assess gastric motility. With technological advancements, hardware innovations such as the multichannel micro-electro-mechanical systems in conjunction with machine learning such as convolution neural networks showed most promise in improving sensitivity in automatically detecting and categorizing bowel sounds. Despite technological promise, challenges persist with regards to validity testing of emerging systems and standardization of bowel sound variance. The review emphasizes the need for a global bowel sound database to address the existing challenges. With further development, this objective, reliable, non-invasiveness, and low-cost modality could transform gastrointestinal diagnostics and monitoring.