A Life Saving Innovation

A company in Chennai has
come out with a revolutionary device called FonoDoc, which is said to
be the world's first device to detect cardiac murmurs, using
'auscultation' technique. The brain behind the device is Arvind
Thiagarajan, chairman and chief inventor, HD Medical Services India.
The unique part of FonoDoc is that it is an integrated visual
auscultation device with murmur detection and printing capabilities.
The sound waves from the heart are converted into digital waveforms
for getting a print out.

According to Thiagarajan,
“FonoDoc can detect the murmurs, using an integrated murmur
detection algorithm called
MurmurDoc, within 10 secs. Under the directions of Ministry of Health
and Family Welfare, Government of India, JIPMER Institute at
Puducherry conducted a detailed evaluation of this device and
certified its sensitivity as 93% and specificity as 95%, based on
Echocardiography as the gold standard.” The device has also got
specialist accreditations. According to Dr Tat Jin Teo, director, HD
medical and a globally renowned ultrasound scientist, “Presently it
is difficult to detect the cardiac murmurs through normal
stethoscopes. To rule out the possibility of cardiac abnormalities,
one has to undergo ultrasound echocardiography, which is highly
expensive and not easily available at rural healthcare centers. Even
if Echocardiogram is made available at a lower cost, a non-specialist
would find it very difficult to acquire and interpret the
echocardiogram images.” Interestingly late last year in a rural
medical camp organized at Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu, out of 60 patients
referred for cardiac screening, 10 patients were detected positive
for cardiac murmurs through this device. Later the patients were
taken to a leading hospital in Chennai, where doctors after using
conventional diagnostics methods such as echocardiography confirmed
the same. Those patients were treated immediately and their lives
were saved. Without this device, these patients' medical condition
would have gone unnoticed.

“Since this is a unique
Indian product and first of its kind in the world, medical industry
in US and Europe are also showing keen interest in our devices. We
have already been granted worldwide patents for thistechnology and
also have secured regulatory approvals such as FDA in USA and CE
certification in Europe,” says Thiagarajan

The inventor of this
device, Thiagarajan was inspired by his mentor Dr Abdul Kalam and his
mission is to develop world class accessible medicaldiagnostics and
FonoDoc is just the beginning. He says that HD Medical is a unique
company that brings new technologies that challenge conventional
boundaries. In the case of FonoDoc, it is indeed a big leap as it
uses visual auscultation. In cardiac terms, according to experts,
auscultation is atried and tested method to examine a patient. It is
the art of listening to the chest, to decipher the sounds made by the
heart and the lungs. It is diagnosed
through acoustic stethoscope. But many times a finer analysis is not
possible as the doctor has to really spend time in analyzing what he
hears on the stethoscope. But even then an analysis based on
conventional wisdom is not possible always. Here is where FonoDoc
makes its impressive entry by using visual auscultation. This brings
2 techniques- digital stethoscope and PhonoCardiogram (PCG) to the
fore without losing the original value of either. While digital
stethoscope analyzes the heart, the PCG gives the visual
representation. Here HD Medical uses advanced and patented algorithms
to help decipher the sound, reduce noise, and discern true signals
thus empowering the doctors to make the right decisions.