Different lung sounds4/11/2024 ![]() If spectrograms have a positive effect in the classification of lung sounds it would then help make auscultation training more simple and effective. Therefore, we do not know whether the use of spectrograms would help medical students to better classify lung sounds. ![]() However, the design of this study did not isolate the effect of spectrograms and therefore this affirmation is inconclusive. 12 found that the spectrograms do have a positive impact on how medical students assign a diagnosis with the help of lung sounds. The use of spectrograms could improve the teaching of lung sounds by giving an aid to the listening abilities in training. It would be natural to think that the use of a visual support could help to improve the classification of lung sounds since there are two sensory inputs instead of one. 1) which may be of help in the identification of these sounds 11. In spectrograms, adventitious lung sounds, such as wheezes and crackles, show recognizable patterns, (Fig. A spectrogram is a visual representation of the spectrum of frequencies of a signal as it varies with time. One of these possibilities is the generation of spectrograms from digital lung sounds recordings. This opens many possibilities to analyze and share lung sounds. However, new electronic stethoscopes can capture and store sounds in a digital form. It has been suggested that difficulties in teaching and learning auscultation also contribute to the demise of this technique 10. These limitations of traditional auscultation make the training of new health professionals a challenging task. This might have an impact on the patients making them feel as objects 9. The inability of the traditional stethoscope for collective hearing also creates situations where patients with an uncommon heart or lung sound will be repetitively auscultated by numerous students who are only interested in “the sound”. This variation is caused not only due to health professionals failing to identify lung sounds, but also due to different labeling of the sounds 7, 8. Often, disagreement between health professionals arises when classifying lung sounds and the reliability in the classification of wheezes and crackles has been found to be moderate at best 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Since stethoscopes are designed for individual listening it is not possible to share the sounds with other colleagues for discussion. However, the identification and interpretation of the sounds remains a subjective task. Health professionals use it to guide clinical decisions and treatment strategies 1. Similar content being viewed by othersĬhest auscultation is a widely used method in the diagnosis and follow up of several diseases. We observed a higher improvement in the classification of crackles compared to wheezes. Thus, we conclude that the use of spectrograms had a positive impact on the inter-rater agreement and the agreement with experts. For crackles, these values were k = 0.22 and k = 0.40 (p = <0.01) in the same order. ![]() In a group analysis we observed that Fleiss kappa values were k = 0.51 and k = 0.56 (p = 0.63) for classifying wheezes without and with spectrograms. When classifying crackles 16 out of 23 showed improvement when spectrograms were used. In an individual analysis comparing each student to an expert annotated reference standard we found that 13 out of 23 students had a positive change in kappa when classifying wheezes with the help of spectrograms. We also calculated Fleiss kappa for the 23 observers with and without the spectrogram. We calculated kappa values for the agreement between each student and the expert classification with and without display of spectrograms and tested for significant improvement between these two coefficients. First sound only, then sound with spectrograms. The students classified the recordings in a random order twice. The sample contained 15 normal recordings and 15 with wheezes or crackles. To do this, we asked twenty-three medical students at UiT the Arctic University of Norway to classify 30 lung sounds recordings for the presence of wheezes and crackles. In this study, we tested if the use of spectrograms improves the agreement when classifying wheezes and crackles. ![]() New technological developments like the use of visSual representation of sounds through spectrograms could improve the agreement when classifying lung sounds, but this is not yet known. However, the interpretation of lung sounds is a subjective task and disagreements arise. Chest auscultation is a widely used method in the diagnosis of lung diseases. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |