This Handheld Puck Can Deliver Better Heart Valve Disease Diagnoses Than a Stethoscope
Researchers claim their device can be used without the training needed for a stethoscope, and picks up danger signs more reliably.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge and the University of Birmingham have developed a handheld gadget that can help untrained users diagnose heart disease — without the training required of the traditional stethoscope.
"The symptoms of VHD [Valvular Heart Disease] can be easily confused with certain respiratory conditions, which is why so many patients don’t receive a stethoscope examination," explains project lead Anurag Agarwal. "However, the accuracy of stethoscope examination for diagnosing heart valve disease is fairly poor, and it requires a GP [General Practitioner] to conduct the examination. "
To help get waiting lists down, and to make sure we're diagnosing heart valve disease early enough that simple interventions can improve quality of life," Agarwal continues, "we wanted to develop an alternative to a stethoscope that is easy to use as a screening tool."
That screening tool is a handheld gadget roughly the size of a beermat, equipped with six piezoelectric sensors designed to detect vibrations from the patient's heart — each sensor isolated from its neighbors by a vibration-absorbing gel, to prevent cross contamination of signals. With a bigger surface area and more sensors, the team say it's less sensitive to positioning than a traditional stethoscope.
The team claims another advantage for its creation, too: where a stethoscope requires a trained user to interpret the sounds, the sensor's readings can be fed into a companion machine learning algorithm, which the researchers found in testing can outperform GPs in detecting the signs of heart valve disease.
"If successful," Agarwal claims, "this device could become an affordable and scalable solution for heart health screening, especially in areas with limited medical resources."
The team's work has been published in the IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics under closed-access terms; an open-access preprint is available on the medRxiv server. No timescale for clinical trials has yet been disclosed, but its creators have filed for a patent under Cambridge Enterprise with a view to commercialization.