INTRODUCTION Emergency medicine residents use simulation training for many reasons, such as gaining experience with critically ill patients and becoming familiar with disease processes. Residents frequently criticize simulation training using current high-fidelity mannequins due to the poor quality of physical exam findings present, such as auscultatory findings, as it may lead them down an alt...

Sensors used for lung sound research are generally designed by the investigators or adapted from devices used in related fields. Their relative characteristics have never been defined. We employed an artificial chest wall with a viscoelastic surface and a white noise signal generator as a stable source of sound to compare the frequency response and pulse waveform reproduction of a selection of ...

During annual physical examinations, a primary-care physician listens to the heart using a stethoscope to assess the condition of the heart muscle and valves. This process, termed cardiac auscultation, is the primary means of diagnosing cardiac disorders, the most common of which is Mitral Valve Prolapse (MVP). Yet, the practice of auscultation is highly fallible with reports of more than 80% o...

To the Editor: Vancomycin-resistant enterococci (VRE) have been isolated from a variety of surfaces in the hospital environment, including gowns, call buttons, bed rails, blood pressure cuffs, and stethoscopes.Contaminated electronic rectal thermometers and ear-probe thermometers have been implicated as possible sources for transmission of VRE. High rates of contamination of stethoscopes with b...

BACKGROUND Stethoscope diaphragms have been shown to harbor potentially pathogenic bacteria. OBJECTIVES To assess bacterial contamination on the diaphragm and under the plastic rim that secures the diaphragm of stethoscopes of physicians, nurses, medical students, and house staff in an intensive care unit and a general medical ward of a large university hospital. Also to compare the effective...

In the field of medicine, with the introduction of computer systems that can collect and analyze massive amounts of data, many non-invasive diagnostic methods are being developed for a variety of conditions. In this study, our aim is to develop a non-invasive method of classifying respiratory sounds that are recorded by an electronic stethoscope and the audio recording software that uses variou...

In this paper, we propose a design and implementation of a Web-Based remote digital stethoscope that integrates current software, hardware interface devices, PC, and Internet into the remotely operated virtual instrumentation. The interface devices of this prototype system consist of a traditional stethoscope, a microphone, a sound card, and a headphone. In the network hardware, we use power li...