Use of Tape-Recorded Heart Sounds in Screening of Children for Heart Disease

An automated tape-recording unit for use in screening large populations of school children for heart disease has been developed and field tested. A technician can produce good quality apex and base heart sound recordings from 250 children during an average school day. The physician can listen to these recordings at a rate of 140 children per hour, recalling for examination each child considered to have an abnormal recording. Since almost all heart disease in children has some acoustic manifestation, a screening technic based on the heart sounds seems to be a logical one. The studies done with this unit have demonstrated its ability to select children with heart disease from a large number of normal children. Agreement between readers is satisfactory, and the number of "false positives" is considered reasonable.