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. 2026 Jun 12;26(12):3768.
doi: 10.3390/s26123768.

A CNN-MAMBA-Based Framework for Salient Bowel Sound Detection and Gastrointestinal Health Assessment

Affiliations

A CNN-MAMBA-Based Framework for Salient Bowel Sound Detection and Gastrointestinal Health Assessment

Zixuan Zeng et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

With the rapid aging of the global population, constipation has become a major gastrointestinal concern among elderly individuals. Bowel sounds provide a non-invasive acoustic signal for assessing gastrointestinal function, but their automatic analysis remains challenging due to sparsity and non-stationarity. This study proposes a two-stage bowel sound analysis framework based on continuous abdominal recordings. First, a Convolutional Neural Network-MAMBA (CNN-MAMBA) model was used for salient bowel sound detection. Second, a patient-level constipation classification model was developed using multi-view spectral representations and a Convolutional Neural Network-Conformer-Multiple Instance Learning (CNN-Conformer-MIL) architecture. On a held-out test set, the detection model achieved an accuracy of 0.87, an F1-score of 0.78, and a ROC-AUC of 0.93. For patient-level classification under binary Bristol Stool Form Scale (BSFS) grouping, five-fold cross-validation yielded a mean accuracy of 0.665 and an F1-score of 0.755. All BSFS labels were annotated by clinical physicians and temporally aligned with bowel sound recording. Given the modest improvement and cross-validation variability, the patient-level results should be interpreted as preliminary feasibility evidence. These findings suggest that bowel sound analysis may serve as an auxiliary screening or longitudinal monitoring tool rather than a stand-alone diagnostic system.

Keywords: CNN-Conformer-MIL; CNN-MAMBA; bowel sound analysis; constipation classification; elderly population; gastrointestinal health assessment; multi-view spectral representation; salient event detection.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Overall framework of the proposed bowel sound analysis system. The framework includes five main stages: (1) preprocessing, (2) segment construction, (3) feature extraction and fusion, (4) salient segment detection using a CNN-MAMBA model, and (5) constipation classification from segment level to patient level.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Architecture of the proposed CNN-MAMBA model for salient bowel sound detection.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Architecture of the proposed CNN-Conformer-MIL model for segment-level acoustic modeling.
Figure 4
Figure 4
ROC curves of representative models on the test set.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Prediction score distributions of TP, FP, FN, and TN samples on the test set.

References

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