Strategic Initiative Fund (SIF)

mi-SonoPatch: Smart Acute Abdominal Assessment

The project aims to improve how emergency departments evaluate acute abdominal pain, a leading cause of emergency room visits and CT imaging. Health providers currently listen for abdominal health with a stethoscope; however, this is subjective, brief, spatially limited, and poorly reproducible, while CT scans are costly, time-consuming, expose patients to radiation, and contribute to emergency room bottlenecks. The mi-SonoPatch proposes a noninvasive, wearable acoustic monitoring system that continuously captures bowel sounds across multiple abdominal regions to help clinicians identify which patients truly need CT imaging, especially for suspected mechanical bowel obstruction.

The project’s first aim is to construct and validate the mi-SonoPatch prototype. The device is a low-cost smart acoustic patch built from micro-electro-mechanical systems microphones or piezoelectric sensor arrays, designed to record high-fidelity bowel sounds while correcting for motion artifacts caused by breathing and abdominal muscle activity.

The second and third aims focus on building the clinical and computational foundation needed for diagnosis. The team plans to enroll 1,000 adult ED patients with acute abdominal pain and 250 healthy controls to create a foundational acoustic biobank.

Long-term, the project envisions mi-SonoPatch as an AI-enabled reinvention of the stethoscope, transforming a centuries-old, subjective instrument into an objective diagnostic platform.