Computer-aided auscultation of the heart: from anatomy and physiology to diagnostic decision support.

There is a clear and present need for computer-aided auscultation of the heart which arises from the highly informative nature of heart sounds, the inherent difficulty of auscultation and increasing pressure in healthcare for rapid, accurate, objective, documented and cost-effective patient evaluation and diagnostic decision making. There are advanced signal processing technologies that hold promise for developing computer-aided auscultation solutions that are intuitive, efficient, informative and accurate. Computer-aided auscultation offers an objective, quantitative and cost-effective tool for acquiring and analyzing heart sounds, providing archival records that support the patient evaluation and referral decision as well as serial comparisons for patient monitoring. There is the further promise of new quantitative acoustic measures and auscultatory findings that have more precise correlation with underlying physiological parameters. These solutions are being developed with the benefits of a rich literature of clinical studies in phonocardiography, the added insights derived from echocardiography, and advances in signal processing technology.