A lightweight deep learning based bowel sounds segmentation algorithm for gastrointestinal (GI) monitoring

Segmentation of bowel sounds (BS) events is a significant task of automatic BS monitoring. Recently, deep learning (DL) has been utilized to realize the segmentation of BS events. However, most researchers treat BS segmentation as a traditional classification problem, which causes that more precise locations for the occurrence of BS events are unable to obtained. Besides, the performance of segmentation of BS events is easily affected by thresholds of model output in practical applications. To tackle these issues, in this paper, a lightweight DL-based BS segmentation algorithm is proposed. The one-dimensional convolution layers and bidirectional gate recurrent unit (GRU) layers are adopted to enhance the ability of feature extraction. A loss function named shape loss is proposed to reduce the sensitivity of model to thresholds. Moreover, a portable BS monitoring device is developed to realize data acquisition, display and algorithm deployment. Based on this device, experiments on human and rats are conducted to verify the effectiveness of our proposed approach. Experimental results shows that the proposed method outperforms other comparison methods with the higher f1-scores and lower sensitivity to thresholds.