10^th World Pediatric Congress

Biography

Biography: Layla Taryam

Abstract

Innocent heart murmurs occur in approximately 50% of healthy children at some point in their childhood and Still’s murmur is the most prevalent of these innocent pediatric heart murmurs. General physicians (GPs) are not very successful in distinguishing innocent Still’s murmur from pathological heart murmurs and consequently, a large number of children are unnecessarily referred to pediatric cardiologists. Besides cost and inconvenience, these unnecessary referrals are a source of anxiety and stress in children and families while waiting to see a pediatric cardiologist. Our objective has to develop a novel technology that could identify Still’s murmur with high accuracy at the point of care to aid GPs in their decisions regarding referral to a specialist. We have created a novel stethoscope that connects to a smartphone and developed a custom application that records heart sounds and analyzes them for the presence of Still’s murmur. This solution is called StethAid. The stethoscope records heart sounds with a quality comparable to that of a commercial electronic stethoscope. The analysis algorithm has been developed and tested using an in-house murmur library with clinically documented diagnoses. Using StethAid we recorded heart sounds of 78 pediatric patients at the two UAE Ministry of Health and Prevention Hospitals. Four of these patients had Still’s murmur, while the rest had a pathological murmur. The app identified these murmurs with over 90% accuracy. The proposed technology could potentially lower the current high rate of specialist referrals associated with Still’s murmur and reduce the related financial and emotional costs.