Development of a virtual reality application for interactive visualization of respiratory sounds signals

Abstract

Waveform analysis of Respiratory Sound (RS) signals has been useful to identify and characterize adventitious sounds, both discontinuous (transients and explosive with a duration of about 5 and 10 ms) and continuous (quasiperiodic and musical with a duration of more than 100 ms), related to pulmonary pathologies. Thus, a medical doctor aided with time expansion of RS is able to detect the presence of these events and use information of their counting, location, and characteristics to assist the clinical diagnosis. However, the visual analysis of RS in conventional monitors becomes slow and tedious, which limits its use in health centers because of lack of time, especially in developing countries, where an excessive workload is a common scenario. This work proposes an interactive visualization system as an alternative to address such limitations. The system uses Virtual Reality (VR) to enable an easy and natural manipulation of displayed RS signals within isolation environments.