2D Analysis of Acoustic Transfer Through the Chest Cavity of Sounds Associated With Coronary Artery Disease

Cardiovascular disease represents the leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for about 35% of all deaths, the majority of which are due to Coronary Artery Disease (CAD), which alone accounts for 20% of all deaths [1]. This is primarily due to the difficulty in early diagnosis of CAD; only about 20% of all cases are diagnosed prior to the patient’s first heart attack [2]. This is due to the limitations of current diagnostic techniques, which are either invasive or prohibitively expensive for use as a screening test for CAD. Phonoangiography is a technique that promises inexpensive and noninvasive diagnosis of CAD by detecting the flow noise created by turbulent flow within a stenosed coronary artery, also known as a bruit in the medical community. This technique is not currently used due to the difficulties of detecting the faint sound of a bruit in the noisy environment of the chest. To the authors’ knowledge, analysis of the acoustic transfer of cardiovascular sounds through the chest has not studied previously. We hypothesize that the acoustic transfer function at different locations on the chest surface is significantly dependent on the source location, which would provide a signal processing technique for detecting the presence of CAD.