Electronic stethoscopes offer several advantages over conventional acoustic stethoscopes, including noise reduction, increased amplification, and ability to store and transmit sounds. However, the acoustical characteristics of electronic and acoustic stethoscopes can differ significantly, introducing a barrier for clinicians to transition to electronic stethoscopes. This work proposes a method to process lung sounds recorded by an electronic stethoscope, such that the sounds are perceived to have been captured by an acoustic stethoscope. The proposed method calculates an electronic-to-acoustic stethoscope filter by measuring the difference between the average frequency responses of an acoustic and an electronic stethoscope to multiple lung sounds. To validate the method, a change detection experiment was conducted with 51 medical professionals to compare filtered electronic, unfiltered electronic, and acoustic stethoscope lung sounds. Participants were asked to detect when transitions occurred in sounds comprising several sections of the three types of recordings. Transitions between the filtered electronic and acoustic stethoscope sections were detected, on average, by chance (sensitivity index equal to zero) and also detected significantly less than transitions between the unfiltered electronic and acoustic stethoscope sections (p<0.01p < 0.01), demonstrating the effectiveness of the method to filter electronic stethoscopes to mimic an acoustic stethoscope. This processing could incentivize clinicians to adopt electronic stethoscopes by providing a means to shift between the sound characteristics of acoustic and electronic stethoscopes in a single device, allowing for a faster transition to new technology and greater appreciation for the electronic sound quality.

中文翻译：

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电子听诊器滤波模仿声学听诊器的感知声音特征


与传统声学听诊器相比，电子听诊器具有多种优势，包括降噪、增强放大以及存储和传输声音的能力。然而，电子听诊器和声学听诊器的声学特性可能存在显着差异，这给临床医生过渡到电子听诊器带来了障碍。这项工作提出了一种处理电子听诊器记录的肺音的方法，使得声音被感知为是由声学听诊器捕获的。所提出的方法通过测量声学听诊器和电子听诊器对多个肺音的平均频率响应之间的差异来计算电子到声学听诊器滤波器。为了验证该方法，我们与 51 名医疗专业人员进行了变化检测实验，以比较经过滤波的电子、未经滤波的电子和听诊器肺音。参与者被要求检测由三种类型录音的几个部分组成的声音何时发生转变。平均而言，经过滤的电子听诊器部分和声学听诊器部分之间的转换是偶然检测到的（灵敏度指数等于零），并且检测到的转换也明显少于未过滤的电子听诊器部分和声学听诊器部分之间的转换（p<0.01p < 0.01），证明了过滤电子听诊器以模仿声学听诊器的方法的有效性。这种处理可以激励临床医生采用电子听诊器，因为它提供了一种在单个设备中在声学听诊器和电子听诊器的声音特性之间进行转换的方法，从而可以更快地过渡到新技术并更好地欣赏电子音质。