Basic study on separation and visualization of internal organ sound in auscultation

摘要

Target of this research is that patient can listen to sounds of own internal organs, be interesting in and have active involvement in own medical treatment. However, there is nothing in the world patient can listen to the sound of own internal organs. Any patient will be not able to make out sound of particular organ, using stethoscope. Doctor uses the stethoscope for diagnosis catching weak sound of something disease from internal organs, without any harm to body. Doctors can extract only desired sound (e.g. chest sound) from sounds of organs (e.g. heart) and the other ambient noise. Doctor's ears and brain allow them to suppress the interference sounds, having their skill and experience of the past auscultation diagnosis. In this paper, we investigate the stethoscope system for both patient and accompanied person to listen to sound of internal organs. Our proposed system use microphone array processing to extract desired sound suppressing other noise sound. The system beamforms toward a target organ using planner microphone array at the front of patient's upper body. The system also outputs three-dimensional sound map that is locations and power spectrums at the same time.