Computer assisted lung sound analysis as an innovative tool to study the effects of respiratory physiotherapy.

Lung auscultation, which is the process of listening to breath sounds, is one of the most commonly used examinations to evaluate respiratory health. Over the last decades computational methods have been developed for the analysis of recorded lung sounds. Computer Aided Lung Sound Analysis (CALSA) aims to overcomel imitations associated with standard lung auscultation by removing the subjective component of the process and allowing quantification of lung sound characteristics. To date, no accepted standard for data acquisition and analysis has been set and none of the proposed approaches have been successfully implemented in clinical practice. During this project we will cooperate with the Faculty of Applied Engineering to develop a simple but robust visual representation for CALSA, which can be easily interpreted by health care professionals. Several clinical studies described in this project aim to validate this analysis and to study the ability of CALSA to measure effects of respiratory therapy. The latter could be of great interest to evaluate different airway clearance techniques. More particularly, there is a lack of adequate outcome measures appropriate for assessing airway clearance, which has been a barrier for the development of evidence based guidelines. Digital auscultation has the potential to be a sensitive, objective and non-invasive tool by providing regional information associated with local changes in the airways.

Keywords:PHYSIOTHERAPY, AUSCULTATIONS, IMAGING TECHNIQUES, CYSTIC FIBROSIS

Disciplines:Paediatrics, Respiratory medicine, Physiotherapy