Assessing the Reliability of a Controllable Sound Source–Driven Bowel Sound Monitoring Device in Physiological Tissue Acoustic Environments
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Objective
To verify the reliability of a self-developed bowel sound monitoring device under real biological tissue acoustic propagation conditions using a controllable sound source, and to establish quantitative evidence for its translational applicability.
Methods
Freshly euthanized six-month-old Bama miniature pigs were used as an experimental model. A high-fidelity Bluetooth audio playback device was implanted into the abdominal cavity to deliver manually annotated bowel sound recordings as controllable acoustic stimuli. A self-developed bowel sound monitoring device was fixed on the abdominal surface for continuous signal acquisition. Playback timestamps were defined as the ground truth, and event-level matching was performed within a predefined temporal tolerance window. Four performance indicators were evaluated: (1) bowel sound acquisition and energy amplification, (2) event matching accuracy, (3) acoustic feature consistency, and (4) subjective agreement assessed by blinded auscultation from gastroenterologists with different levels of clinical experience.
Results
The monitoring device exhibited stable detection capability and effectively covered the full spectral range of the original signals. It significantly enhanced bowel sound energy while preserving temporal and spectral characteristics, demonstrating high consistency in time- and frequency-domain features. Blinded clinician assessments showed a subjective agreement rate of 88.9% between original and surface-recorded bowel sound events.
Conclusions
Under real tissue acoustic propagation conditions, the self-developed bowel sound monitoring device reliably captures bowel sound events with high temporal accuracy, acoustic fidelity, and clinical perceptual consistency. This controllable sound source–based validation provides robust technical evidence for subsequent in vivo studies and clinical translation, supporting the development of objective and continuous gastrointestinal function monitoring.
