Gated auscultation for teaching heart sounds

Abstract

Auscultation is a common part of the physical examination in which health care provider listens to the heart with a stethoscope. Training and experience are required to develop auscultatory skills for accurate clinical assessments. Auscultatory findings must be interpreted within the context of physiological events within the cardiac cycle. In this demonstration, a gated auscultation device (GAD) is employed to facilitate auscultator training. GAD assists in auscultatory examinations by focusing listening on specific periods of systole and diastole to facilitate identification of normal and abnormal heart sounds. GAD allows the student to control the interval of silence or sound during the cardiac cycle. Displays are provided to indicate (a) that gating was successfully achieved, and (b) to allow the listener to determine the timing and duration of the cardiac acoustic events in milliseconds. Thus the health care provider or student can employ standard clinical criteria (timing and duration) to identify physiological and anomalous heart sounds.