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Professor Tim Leighton from the University
of Southampton's world-renowned Institute of Sound
and Vibration Research (ISVR) and Dr Andrew Coleman, of
Guy's and St Thomas NHS Foundation Trust are developing
with industry a 'smart stethoscope' for monitoring the
effectiveness of treatments to shatter kidney stones.
The current procedure, called lithotripsy, focuses
thousands of shock waves onto kidney stones in an effort
to break them into small pieces which can then be
dissolved by drugs or passed from the body in urine.
However, it is difficult to discover exactly when the
treatment has succeeded in breaking the stone and
patients frequently have to experience more shocks than
necessary.
The 'smart stethoscope' listens to the echoes, which
reverberate around the body after each shock wave. The
device has also been used clinically at the London
hospitals Guys and St Thomas.
'It's an imperfect analogy, but consider a railwayman
walking along the length of a train, hitting the metal
wheels with a hammer,' explained Professor Leighton. 'If
the wheel rings nicely, he knows that it's not cracked.
If the wheel is cracked, it gives a duller sound.
'We are looking for the stone to go from being intact
at the start of treatment (when it will give a nice ring
"tick" sound) to being fragmented at the end of the
treatment (when it will give a duller "tock" sound).'
A website containing recordings of these sounds, and
other information on the project, is at
www.isvr.soton.ac.uk/fdag/litho.htm
In addition to Professor Leighton and Dr Coleman, the
team involved Dr Paul White of ISVR, Graham Ball of AWE,
PhD students Fiammetta Fedele, Riza Jamaluddin and Cary
Turangan and Andrew Hurrell of Precision Acoustics Ltd.
Commercial negotiations between the inventors, the
University's Centre for Enterprise and Innovation and
manufacturers of lithotripters are underway. The project
was funded by the Engineering and Physical Science
Research Council (EPSRC).
http://www.soton.ac.uk/
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