Abstract
BackgroundAlthough cardiac auscultation remains important to detect abnormal sounds and murmurs indicative of cardiac pathology, the application of electronic methods remains seldom used in everyday clinical practice. In this report we provide preliminary data showing how the phonocardiogram can be analyzed using color spectrographic techniques and discuss how such information may be of future value for noninvasive cardiac monitoring.MethodsWe digitally recorded the phonocardiogram using a high-speed USB interface and the program Gold Wave http://www.goldwave.com in 55 infants and adults with cardiac structural disease as well as from normal individuals and individuals with innocent murmurs. Color spectrographic analysis of the signal was performed using Spectrogram (Version 16) as a well as custom MATLAB code.ResultsOur preliminary data is presented as a series of seven cases.ConclusionsWe expect the application of spectrographic techniques to phonocardiography to grow substantially as ongoing research demonstrates its utility in various clinical settings. Our evaluation of a simple, low-cost phonocardiographic recording and analysis system to assist in determining the characteristic features of heart murmurs shows promise in helping distinguish innocent systolic murmurs from pathological murmurs in children and is expected to useful in other clinical settings as well.
Highlights
Cardiac auscultation remains important to detect abnormal sounds and murmurs indicative of cardiac pathology, the application of electronic methods remains seldom used in everyday clinical practice
The patients and the normal ones had a history of heart murmur, which included 20 with a ventricular septal defect (VSD), 7 with an atrial septal defect (ASD), 4 with Tetralogy of Fallot (TOF), 10 with aortic stenosis (AS), 5 with pulmonary stenosis (PS), and 4 having mitral regurgitation (MR)
The corresponding color spectrogram is shown in the bottom
Summary
Cardiac auscultation remains important to detect abnormal sounds and murmurs indicative of cardiac pathology, the application of electronic methods remains seldom used in everyday clinical practice. The normal heart produces repeatable physiological sounds. Under some pathologic conditions, such as valvular disease or ventricular septal defects, the presence of turbulent blood flow leads to the production of additional sounds, called murmurs, which are random rather than deterministic in nature. Detecting structural abnormities of the heart such as mitral stenosis or insufficiency remains an important clinical problem. Many such abnormities can be detected by careful auscultation, generally only experienced cardiologists are able to detect important but subtle auscultatory findings with reliability [1-6].
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