EVMS/ODU license virtual
stethoscope to Texas manufacturer
August 24, 2007
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Rick McKenzie, associate professor
of electrical and computer
engineering at ODU, demonstrates a
mock- up of the virtual stethoscope. |
NORFOLK—A Virtual Pathology Stethoscope invented by a team of
researchers from Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) and Old Dominion
University’s Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center (VMASC)
has been licensed to a Texas-based company, Cardionics Inc., which
manufactures medical diagnostic and teaching equipment.
The Virtual Pathology Stethoscope, or VPS, is a training device that can
simulate the sounds of a human body’s circulatory and respiratory
systems. It will be an important addition to the products offered by
Cardionics, according to Keith Johnson, president of the company.
Cardionics specializes in technologies related to auscultation, which is
the art of listening for sounds made by the body's internal organs. Its
current products include an E-Scope Electronic Stethoscope and a Pocket
Monitor Analysis System that have helped to revolutionize bedside
diagnoses.
The invention is the first licensed product to emerge from the
National Center for Collaboration in
Medical Modeling and Simulation, which is a joint venture of EVMS
and Old Dominion University.
Thomas W. Hubbard, M.D., professor of pediatrics and director of the
EVMS Office of Professional Development, leads the team of inventors.
His top collaborator at VMASC is Frederic McKenzie, an ODU associate
professor of electrical and computer engineering.
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The
Virtual Pathology Stethoscope will
look
much like this current product of
Texas manufacturer Cardionics. |
The VPS is designed to be used in tandem with a standardized
patient (SP). Medical schools increasingly train
doctors-to-be by using SPs, who are actors skilled at
pretending to be sick. Working with SPs, medical students
improve their interviewing skills and gain the medical
judgment they need to diagnose ailments.
But when a medical student puts a conventional stethoscope to the body
of the SP, the typically healthy sounds heard don't match the illness
the SP is portraying. The VPS substitutes abnormal sounds for healthy
sounds, so that when the student puts the augmented stethoscope to the
SP’s body, the sounds provide evidence that can support the diagnosis.
The sounds the teaching stethoscope plays are recorded from actual
patients who have a variety of diseases.
Members of the VPS development team took the device and a veteran EVMS
standardized patient, Patrick Walker, to the 4th annual Advanced
Initiatives in Medical Simulations (AIMS) Conference and Congressional
Exhibition in May in Washington, D.C. The invention drew the attention
of numerous conference goers, including Virginia 4th District Rep. Randy
Forbes and Rep. Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, the son of
Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy and a champion of health care issues
in Congress.
Both Kennedy and Forbes took time to test the stethoscope on Walker.
When they listened at his neck, they heard the whooshing sound of
plaque-restricted blood flow through the carotid artery. When they
listened to his chest, they heard crackling sounds in the lungs, a sign
of pneumonia or congestive heart failure.
ODU and EVMS joined forces in 2001 to form the National Center for
Collaboration in Medical Modeling and Simulation, which has attracted
funding from several sources across the nation, including the Stemmler
Medical Research Fund of the National Board of Medicine, as well as
national media attention.
“The VPS is one example of the potential of medical simulation to
improve the training of medical and health professionals and,
ultimately, to improve patient safety,” said C. Donald Combs, Ph.D., who
leads the medical modeling initiative at EVMS. Combs and Mark Scerbo,
professor of human factors psychology at ODU, are co-directors of the
National Center for Collaboration in Medical Modeling and Simulation.
An article late last year in Mechanical Engineering magazine
focused on one of the products of the collaboration — a virtual
operating room. This immensely complicated system, which can be used to
train surgeons and other operating room personnel, utilizes ODU’s Cave
Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE). Combs said these simulations and
others under development are the early returns on the investments that
the federal and state governments have made in the region’s effort to
expand simulation research and development beyond the military market
into areas such as medical modeling and emergency response.
A primary mission of VMASC is to create modeling, simulation and
visualization applications that are practical enough for commercial
development. When representatives from the EVMS
Theresa A. Thomas Center
Professionals Skills Teaching and Assessment Center sought a way to
enhance student training with SPs, they asked VMASC to create the VPS.
McKenzie, the VMASC researcher, said the team’s original VPS is very
high-tech, but too expensive for broad use. This first system is called
“tracked VPS” because it includes a sensing component that tracks on the
body where the stethoscope’s head is placed so the appropriate sound
recording can be cued. The team has a patent pending for the “tracked
VPS,” but then moved on to improve the system’s practicality.
The more economical version, which is the one licensed to Cardionics, is
“SP-triggered VPS,” for which another patent is pending. This is the
system that was demonstrated at the AIMS conference, and for it the SP
uses hidden controls to track the stethoscope’s head and to tell the
system what sounds should be played. The second system is more
economical because it does not have the automatic tracking component.
Preliminary tests with EVMS students have been promising. One series of
tests reported in a paper written by McKenzie, Hubbard and other
colleagues showed that the augmented standardized patient system is “a
reliable and valid assessment tool.”
The project team also includes John Ullian, Gayle Gliva-McConvey and
Robert Alpino of EVMS, and Hector Garcia, Reynel Castelino and Bo Sun
from ODU/VMASC.
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