A remote auscultation support system using network

A remote auscultation support system was developed that compresses and reco rds in real time the patient's breath sound and heart sound, obtained using a stethoscope, and sends this data to an attending doctor at a hospital vi a network. For real-time recording of the breath sound and heart sound, spe cial-purpose, high-quality sound coding technology was developed and incorp orated in the system, This sound coding technology enables the amount of da ta to be reduced to about 1/18 with virtually no deterioration of the prope rties of the auscultation sound, high-speed transmission of this data using network, and remote diagnosis of the auscultation sound by a medical speci alist. The auscultation locations of each patient, together with the doctor , stethoscoper, and patient database are input into the system in advance a t the hospital. At the patient's home or sanatorium, the auscultation sound is recorded according to a human body display that shows auscultation loca tions, and then sent to the hospital. To ensure patient confidentiality whe n the auscultation data is transmitted via network, the system scrambles th e auscultation data and allows only the attending doctor to play and diagno se the auscultation sound. These features not only support an understanding of the condition of patients being treated at home, but they also enable t he construction of an auscultation database for electronic charts that allo ws auscultation results to be shared within the hospital. When this remote auscultation support system was manufactured and its performance was assess ed, virtually the same waveform was obtained for the recorded and played br eath sound as for the original breath sound. Results showed that even at a sampling frequency of 11 kHz, remote diagnosis by a medical specialist was in fact possible. Furthermore, if auscultation data of 10 seconds per locat ion for 10 locations is sent, the amount of data sent is only about 120 Kby tes. Since this amount of data converts to only about 25 pages of electroni c mail text, even via the existing mobile network the auscultation sounds o f many patients can be sent efficiently.