Acoustic Lung Imaging Utilized in Continual Assessment of Patients with Obstructed Airway: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Smart respiratory therapy is enabled by continual assessment of lung functions. This systematic review provides an overview of the suitability of equipment-to-patient acoustic imaging in continual assessment of lung conditions. The literature search was conducted using Scopus, PubMed, ScienceDirect, Web of Science, SciELO Preprints, and Google Scholar. Fifteen studies remained for additional examination after the screening process. Two imaging modalities, lung ultrasound (LUS) and vibration imaging response (VRI), were identified. The most common outcome obtained from eleven studies was positive observations of changes to the geographical lung area, sound energy, or both, while positive observation of lung consolidation was reported in the remaining four studies. Two different modalities of lung assessment were used in eight studies, with one study comparing VRI against chest X-ray, one study comparing VRI with LUS, two studies comparing LUS to chest X-ray, and four studies comparing LUS in contrast to computed tomography. Our findings indicate that the acoustic imaging approach could assess and provide regional information on lung function. No technology has been shown to be better than another for measuring obstructed airways; hence, more research is required on acoustic imaging in detecting obstructed airways regionally in the application of enabling smart therapy.

Continual Monitoring of Respiratory Disorders to Enhance Therapy via Real-Time Lung Sound Imaging in Telemedicine

“…However, the patient's lung and environmental sounds had to be captured for the acoustic signal conditioning to improve the noise resolution and signal accuracy, which may pose privacy issues. The sensor utilized in most studies [7,21,[23][24][25] provides a single data point, which may be insufficient for an in-depth analysis [8,14,[26][27][28][29][30], and the repositioning of the sensor is required if more data points are required and also advanced patient compliance and position accuracy. The MEMS acoustic sensor can be further expanded to an array and provide intuitive and continual assessment remotely.…”

“…Even though the majority of these components have reached a level of development that meets the needs of continuous monitoring applications, the biometric sensors used to capture lung sound signals still need to be developed significantly [7]. Additionally, the literature finds that there is no accurate, noninvasive, affordable, or simple-to-use biometric sensor to measure some challenging but clinically significant characteristics, such as the changes in airway obstructions [7,8].…”