Super-Powered Stethoscope

Reported April 2007

BALTIMORE (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- The roar of a fire truck ... the whine of ambulance sirens ... MedEVAC helicopters overhead. They're first at an accident scene, but they're also loud -- making some emergencies too noisy for paramedics and doctors to listen to a patient's vital signs with a stethoscope.

"You can't hear lung sounds. You can't hear heart sounds inside of a running helicopter," Donald Lehman, a flight paramedic with the Maryland State Police in Pikesville, tells Ivanhoe.

William Bernhard, M.D., an anesthesiologist and Master Flight Surgeon with the U.S. Army in Perryville, Md., says traditional stethoscopes do not work well because of all the outside noise that interferes with the sounds they're trying to listen to. Now a new, ultrasound stethoscope ignores outside noise, allowing medics to hear life-saving sounds inside the body.

"It's extremely helpful because it's the only thing out there on the market that will work," Dr. Bernhard tells Ivanhoe.

Developed by electrical engineers, the device sends an ultrasound wave into the body. When it hits moving organs -- like the heart or lungs -- it bounces back at a different frequency, called the Doppler effect. This change in frequency is converted into sound that medics can hear.

"The exciting thing now is that we have a simple, hand-held device and can be used in these very high noise environments and gives a very, very clean, audible signal," Electrical Engineer Adrian Houtsma, Ph.D. of the U.S. Army Aeromedical Research Laboratory (USAARL), tells Ivanhoe.

The new device is being field tested for the Army, where loud war zones make a standard stethoscope useless ... helping save lives one sound at a time.

Researchers like Dr. Houtsma are in the process of obtaining FDA approval for the device and are working to make sure it doesn't generate signals that interfere with aircraft or other equipment. It will first be manufactured to sell to the armed forces and could cost between $250 and $700.

The traditional stethoscope has hardly changed since its invention in the 1800s by French inventor and physician René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec.

The Acoustical Society of America contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Adrianus J.M. Houtsma, Ph.D.
US Army Aeromedical Research Laboratory
Fort Rucker, AL
(334) 255-6959
adrianus.houtsma@us.army.mil

Acoustical Society of America
Melville, NY 11747-4502
(516) 576-2360
http://asa.aip.org
asa@aip.org

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