An adaptive noise reduction stethoscope for auscultation in high noise environments

Auscultation of lung sounds in patient transport vehicles such as an ambulance or aircraft is unachievable because of high ambient noise levels. Aircraft noise levels of 90–100 dB SPL are common, while lung sounds have been measured in the 22–30 dB SPL range in free space and 65–70 dB SPL within a stethoscope coupler. Also, the bandwidth of lung sounds and vehicle noise typically has significant overlap, limiting the utility of traditional band-pass filtering. In this study, a passively shielded stethoscope coupler that contains one microphone to measure the (noise-corrupted) lung sounds and another to measure the ambient noise was constructed. Lung sound measurements were made on a healthy subject in a simulated USAF C-130 aircraft environment within an acoustic chamber at noise levels ranging from 80 to 100 dB SPL. Adaptive filtering schemes using a least-mean-squares (LMS) and a normalized least-mean-squares (NLMS) approach were employed to extract the lung sounds from the noise-corrupted signal. Approximately 15 dB of noise reduction over the 100–600 Hz frequency range was achieved with the LMS algorithm, with the more complex NLMS algorithm providing faster convergence and up to 5 dB of additional noise reduction. These findings indicate that a combination of active and passive noise reduction can be used to measure lung sounds in high noise environments.