Innovative Software Platform Screens Hearts in Children

A novel computer-aided auscultation (CAA) platform analyzes and classifies heart sounds in order to objectively detect heart murmurs.

The Computational Signal Detection Laboratories eMurmur software platform analyzes and classifies heart sounds acquired via an electronic stethoscope, generating phonocardiograms (PCGs) that are transmitted by either Bluetooth or an audio cable to a mobile phone app. Once received by a Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-compliant server, the results are displayed to the health care professional on a mobile device where they can review, compare, consult, or add findings in an efficient and standardized way.

In a pilot study of 106 children at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), the eMurmur platform differentiated pathologic from innocent heart murmurs with a 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, which is considered the gold standard for diagnosing murmurs. The study was published in the September 2016 issue of Congenital Heart Disease.

“We are providing a technology that elevates the current 200-year-old method of auscultation to a new, much-improved standard,” said Andreas Schriefl, PhD, 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.”

“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,” concluded Dr. Schriefl. “Other unique benefits include e-consultation via the eMurmur web portal and heart sound-monitoring by comparing current with previous auscultation data, including recordings and all findings.”

eMurmur is powered by the CSD Labs’ proprietary Sounds Analysis and Diagnosis Engine (SADIE), a machine intelligence engine that replaces the subjectivity and variability out of auscultation analysis, supplanting it with objective, analytical clarity.