Digitally Listening to Sound of Lungs

Two different devices aimed at improving the quality of auscultation, the action of listening to sounds from the body, lungs in particular, have been recently presented to the medical community. One is a lung sound recording system (LSRS) from TU Graz and the other is a digital stethoscope from John Hopkins’ James West.

 Prototype from TU Graz

A research team at TU Graz in Austria has developed a prototype of a device that records and analyses pathological lung sounds. The researchers hope that this device could be useful for early-stage diagnostics of COVID-19 and other infections, and are now looking to obtain records of COVID-19-positive persons in clinical treatment.

The sounds human bodies make and the changes in those sounds may be indicative of illness. The research team, led by Franz Pernkopf from the Institute of Signal Processing and Speech Communication, has been recording these sounds, of the lung in this particular case, and developing computer-aided analysis methods to assist with medical diagnosis.