Listening Through the Noise: Cauchy-Driven Diffusion Bridges for Robust Gastrointestinal Auscultation and Clinical Benchmarking

Abstract (source: OpenReview · © authors)

Gastrointestinal (GI) motility assessment via bowel sounds (BS) offers a non-invasive alternative to resource-intensive clinical standards. However, the diagnostic utility of BS is often compromised by its spectral overlap with non-stationary speech interference. While generative models have advanced signal restoration, traditional Gaussian-based diffusion frameworks struggle with the impulsive, heavy-tailed nature of real-world clinical noise. In this paper, we propose a novel Cauchy-driven Diffusion Bridge framework to isolate high-fidelity bowel sounds from complex interference. Our contributions are three-fold: (1) We introduce ClinBS, a large-scale clinical dataset (over 25 hours) containing rare pathological transients verified by experts; (2) We mathematically formulate a Cauchy bridge driver, deriving closed-form expressions for the score and density to better model heavy-tailed perturbations; and (3) We implement an efficient sampling procedure via Gaussian scale-mixture reparameterization. Extensive experiments show our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming baselines by 13.4%–49.8% across core metrics and elevating abnormal BS recognition accuracy to 88.01%. These results demonstrate the system's potential for robust clinical GI monitoring and diagnosis.

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