<p>This paper provides a critical overview of the advances in the area of early identification of different types of abnormalities and diseases using noninvasive screening of biomedical acoustics. Different organs, glands, and tissues in the human body generate sounds and vibrations during their normal activities. These signals propagate through the surrounding tissues and eventually reach the body surface, where they can be noninvasively recorded using sensors such as stethoscopes, accelerometers, and gyroscopes. Any variations in the normal activity of an organ or system change these signals in their origin and subsequently on the body surface. For example, heart sounds auscultation is a cheap approach that clinicians have relied on for many years to monitor cardiac activities. The presence of a cardiovascular abnormality or malfunction might create turbulences in the downstream blood flow in a vessel. These turbulences generate sounds and vibrations in specific frequency bands (depending on the morphology and severity of the abnormality) that transmit to the vessel wall, other tissues, and body surface. Similarly, respiratory illnesses, digestive disorders, nervous system diseases, motor abnormalities, and dysphagia lead to variations in body sounds and vibrations. Continuous monitoring of these variations on the body surface using wearable devices potentially leads to timely diagnosis and treatment of these diseases. Advancements in wearables coupled with the developments in computing, signal processing, and machine learning methods have enabled the long-term real-time measurement and analysis of these signals outside of clinical settings. This paper reviews the effectiveness of these techniques for early diagnosis and monitoring of cardiovascular, respiratory, gastrointestinal, and nervous system diseases. For each group of diseases, the measurement methods, signal processing algorithms for customized feature extraction and classification, the accuracy of the classification approaches, clinical potentials, current limitations, and future directions are reviewed. We conducted an in-depth comprehensive search of Web of Knowledge, Embase, MEDLINE, and SCOPUS databases with the keywords including “sound”, “vibration”, “acoustics”, “cardiovascular system”, “circulatory system”, “gastrointestinal system”, “digestive system”, “nervous system”, “respiratory system”, and “noninvasive diagnosis”. Out of 657 research papers available in the above-mentioned databases from 1980 to 2021, 61 peer-reviewed papers were found to fall under the search and selection criteria of this review. This study suggests that despite many research studies conducted in the area of developing noninvasive diagnostic tools based on biomedical acoustics, there are open issues to be addressed, in most applications, to transform these methods from a research interest to a powerful bedside or home monitoring tool.</p>

Advances in Noninvasive Diagnosis Based on Body Sounds and Vibrations – a Review

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2021/volume/85543

ASME 2021 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE2021)

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