Giving the Humble Stethoscope an AI Upgrade Could Save Millions of Kids (ieee.org)

the_newsbeagle writes: The stethoscope is a ubiquitous medical tool that has barely changed since it was invented in the early 1800s. But now a team of engineers, doctors, and public health researchers have come together to reinvent the tool using adaptive acoustics and AI. Their motivation is this statistic: Every year, nearly 1 million kids die of pneumonia around the world, with most deaths in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The death toll is highest among children under the age of 5. The researchers, from Johns Hopkins University, designed a smart stethoscope for use by unskilled workers in noisy medical clinics. It uses a dynamic audio filtering system to remove ambient noise and distracting body sounds while not interfering with the subtle sounds from the lungs. And it uses AI to analyze the cleaned-up signal and provide a diagnosis.

Comments

Why would it need to change?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've noticed that doctors barely use the thing anymore except for its symbolic value. Put on prominent display, it signals "look out, I went to medical school!"

I've even had one arrogant turd of a doctor have a highly polished untouched stethoscope on display on his desk... unused.

Cool stuff

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

This is the stuff AI (or what passes for AI) can help solve- all sorts of fiddly problems that can benefit from the introduction of a "smart tool". I'm all for smarter gadgets and diagnostics that can help give regular/untrained people the ability to deal with various problems.

I mean, HELLO, this is what computers are meant to do- to help us do things we couldn't otherwise do.

Sure, maybe the wizards at the Mayo Clinic won't use it, but they aren't the target audience. I can see where this could be useful in all sorts of circumstances. On the battlefield, for one, but also in places where people trained to decipher the sounds heard through a stethoscope are far and few between.

It's like the super-simple AEDs (Automated External Defibrillator) that you see in offices and stores- they're simple enough that almost anyone can use one to restart a heart. My office has one and looks pretty straightforward to use.

Gadgets like a smarter stethoscope could help save some lives, and that's a good thing.

Re:How to fix medical care

[drinkypoo]

You have it completely backwards. The stethoscope won't have a bad day, it doesn't have ear wax, and it doesn't have to go to school. And the data will be produced through analysis, and it will have heard more conditions than any doctor. Doctors expect pneumonia. Computers don't. They process signals and match patterns.

In the future, doctors may be rare, and involved in only the very strangest and most complex cases, while nurses with advanced diagnostic equipment handle the routine stuff. And the computers will learn from the doctors, and health care will improve as a result.

As for the beginning of your comment, there is a world-wide shortage of doctors at the moment. I don't know how it works in other countries, but in this one the AMA has made it difficult to become one in a lot of irrelevant ways, which is to say they don't improve overall quality. Washing someone out because they don't perform well in an ER environment when they might be a perfectly good practitioner in other contexts, for example. Not every doc needs to work in the ER. We cannot survive your plan.