The Utility of Heart Sounds and Systolic Intervals Across the Care Continuum

Abstract

Acoustic cardiography is an exciting, new, easy-to-use, modernized technology that incorporates already proven techniques of phonocardiography. Application of acoustic cardiography to clinical practice can improve diagnosis and management of heart failure patients. Its clinical use should help address some of the need for robust, inexpensive, and widely accessible technology for proactive heart failure diagnosis and management. Acoustic cardiographically recorded measurements have been correlated with both cardiac catheterization and echocardiographically determined hemodynamic parameters. Heart sounds captured by acoustic cardiograms have proven to assist clinicians in assessing dyspneic patients in the emergency department by utilizing the strong specificity of an S3 for detecting acute decompensated heart failure. Acoustic cardiography offers a cost-efficient, easy-to-use method to optimize the devices used in cardiac resyncronization therapy. The rapidly and easily obtainable information gathered by acoustic cardiography should foster its more widespread use in diagnosis and treatment of heart failure, including cardiac resyncronization therapy device optimization.

Estimation of left ventricular function using a novel acoustic‐based device

“…(iv) The spatial‐temporal heterogeneity of cardiac acoustics was negatively associated with LVEF, presumably reflecting cardiac mechanical dyssynchrony associated with advanced LV dysfunction [8]. (v) The pre‐ejection period was negatively associated with LVEF [9], whereas ejection period was not. As a single variable, each of the above acoustic variables was significantly associated with LVEF, but these associations were relatively weak and insufficient to predict the LVEF.…”

A Comparison of Acoustic Cardiography and Echocardiography for Optimizing Pacemaker Settings in Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy

“…Recently, acoustic cardiography (AUDICOR®, Inovise, Portland, OR, USA) has been developed as an accurate, convenient, and cost‐effective method of hemodynamic assessment 19–28 . This automated method requires very little specialized training and uses proprietary dual‐purpose sensors placed in the V3 or V4 positions to simultaneously record digital ECG and heart sound data.…”