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

Re:Why would it need to change?

[PPH]

untouched stethoscope on display on his desk

Of course the one he actually uses he keeps stored in the refrigerator.

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.