A new study is being touted by Computational Signal Detection (CSD) Laboratories LLC, which supports the clinical utility of its eMurmur Computer-Aided Auscultation (CAA) platform for early and ongoing heart-health screening of children.
Background
While up to 90% of children will have a heart murmur at some point during their infancy or childhood, the majority of these heart murmurs detected in children will be clinically insignificant. The diagnostic challenge therefore is to separate the pathologic from the innocent.
CSD’s eMurmur is a software platform specifically designed for the objective detection of heart murmurs. It analyzes and classifies heart sounds acquired via an electronic stethoscope, generating data that is transmitted by either Bluetooth® or audio cable using a mobile phone app. Once received by an HIPAA-compliant server, the results are displayed to the health care professional on his/her mobile device where he/she can review, compare, consult, or add his/her own findings in an efficient and standardized way.
Published in Congenital Heart Disease, this pilot study of 106 children at Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, resulted in eMurmur differentiating pathologic from innocent heart murmurs with high sensitivity (87%) and specificity (100%), a positive predictive value of 100%, a negative predictive value of 90%, and high accuracy (94%) when compared with echocardiography as the gold standard for diagnosing murmurs.
Company comments
“We are providing a technology that elevates the current 200-year-old method of auscultation to a new, much-improved standard,” said Andreas Schriefl, Ph.D., CEO and Founder of CSD Labs. “eMurmur is rapid, objective, accurate and fully standardized in its ability to identify and classify heart murmurs. There is a dire clinical need for our eMurmur platform because the status quo of auscultation is prone to error and uncertainty, leading to stress for patients and medical professionals and waste in the system.”
“This novel way of standardized documentation of auscultation findings can be utilized by medical professionals performing auscultation in their daily routine right at their patient’s side,” added Dr. Schriefl. “Moreover, eMurmur’s web portal offers medical professionals the capacity to retrieve a PDF report containing all of the above results, and enables integration into electronic patient files and hospital information systems. Other unique benefits include e-consultation via the eMurmur web portal (i.e., remote case reviewing by medical experts); and heart sound-monitoring by comparing current with previous auscultation data, including recordings and all findings.”
Source: CSD Labs LLC
published: November 14, 2016 in: Cardio, Clinical Studies/Trials