Heart diseases produce characteristic sound which can be heard at the chest with a stethoscope. This work attempts to understand the causes of these sounds and use this knowledge to create and smart stethoscope, capable of automatic diagnosis. One example of a sound producing valvular heart disease is aortic stenosis, which produces a crescendo-decrescendo sound as blood is pushed through the valve. We will attempt to understand the cause of this sound by testing artificial heart valves, modified to simulate aortic stenosis, in water. These results will be correlated against recordings from 60 patients, with varying degrees aortic stenosis, from Papworth Hospital. From these results, we hope to produce an algorithm capable of differentiating the sound signal of aortic stenosis from a healthy heart sound signal and also predict the severity of the stenosis.
| Dr. Anurag Agarwal |
Department of Engineering |
| Mr. Edmund Kay |
Department of Engineering |
| Dr. Len Shapiro |
Consultant Cardiologist, Papworth Hospital |
