SCIENCE FOUNDATION IRELAND: Case StudyOne of the more novel convergence projects being funded by SFI is a new multi-channel stethoscope for the detection of coronary artery disease
DR SCOTT RICKARD moved to Ireland and University College Dublin in 2003 to take up a post as senior lecturer in the school of electrical, electronic and mechanical engineering.
In 2005 he was awarded almost €1 million from SFI under the SFI President of Ireland Young Researcher Award. The funding enabled him and his research team to work on the development of a highly innovative multi-channel stethoscope specifically designed to diagnose early stage coronary heart disease.
"The chances are that one of the two of us engaged in this conversation will die of some form of coronary heart disease," Rickard notes, without a hint of alarm in his tone. "This is caused by us doing things that we know we shouldn't - smoking, drinking, eating the wrong food, not doing exercise. This causes a hardening of the arteries due to plaque which builds up over time. The arteries get clogged to a stage which produces turbulence and this makes noise similar to that which people hear when an aircraft is going through air turbulence."
The problem with the arterial turbulence is that it's not very easy to hear. "It's not really audible in a reliable way," says Rickard. "The noise is just at the cusps of what is humanly audible. This is where the multi-channel stethoscope comes in to play; it detects the presence of the sound and points to its location. If it finds the noise this can flag up the need for the patient to visit a cardiologist."
This is where the technology gets very smart. "At the core of the stethoscope is applied maths which takes the sounds that emanate from the heart and converts them to a musical score," he explains. "Some people's hearts are playing Beethoven, others are playing Mozart while others are playing Metallica. If it's Metallica that might be an indication that they should visit a cardiologist. But it also depends on where the sound is coming from - Metallica is okay coming from one place but very bad coming from another. What we are doing is listening to the music of your heart."
He is quick to point out that this is not an attempt to replace the work of cardiologists. "The idea is to help GPs quickly diagnose a problem and refer patients to cardiologists," he says. "What we hope this will mean will be that cardiologists will only be seeing patients that they should be seeing. This will give them more time to spend with each patient."
Rickard also hopes it will improve detection rates. "The device will probably be available in the form of a vest containing a number of microphones which the patient will slip on in the same manner as putting on the cuff for a blood pressure test," he explains. "The GP will be able to do the test in a few minutes and ascertain whether the patient should visit a cardiologist. The project here in UCD is called the Darius project after a young student, Darius Vasseghi, who died of an undiagnosed congenital cardiac defect. We hope that this device will help reduce the number of such deaths by providing an easy means of detecting the defect."
The new device has its origins partly in the world of espionage and covert surveillance. "My core research area before this project was in the area of sound separation for audio," says Rickard. "I was the co-inventor of an algorithm that could separate out all of the voices in a room that were picked up from two closely spaced microphones. This technology was subsequently licensed to the FBI who use it in court hearings to establish who was speaking in voice recordings."
The stethoscope project is very much a product of convergence. "One of the reasons why this is a convergence project is that UCD has set up the Complex & Adaptive Systems Laboratory (CASL) of which I am director," he explains.
"This is a flagship collaborative laboratory which brings people together from seven or eight different schools in UCD including everything from business to biomedicine. This helps to break down the barriers which have existed between different disciplines and which can be an obstacle to research.
"One of the benefits of this is that I am now working with a guy, Dr Chris Bean, who has been listening for turbulent lava flow in volcanoes for years," Rickard adds. "It turns out that the problems we are dealing with are quite similar and we have been able to work together and help each other. Normally we wouldn't meet up, but we did thanks to CASL and this is where convergence comes in."
He is optimistic for Ireland's future in the convergence area. "CASL has been given an unprecedented amount of funding by the Government and I very much appreciate that", he says. "Based on what the government has done in the recent budget they are saying that the economic driver for the future is science and technology and I'll certainly be here to help realise that vision. I'm very much here for the long haul."
