Congratulations to Dr Abdul Ihdayhid from the Faculty of Health Sciences who was successful in receiving a Ramaciotti Health Investment Grant for his project “Development of artificial intelligence guided cardiac auscultation to improve diagnosis of valvular heart disease”.

Heart valve diseases (HVD) are common, serious conditions that frequently go undiagnosed leading to risk of cardiac complications or premature death. Identifying the presence of a heart murmur using a stethoscope is often a key first step in identifying patients with HVD. This is especially true for Australians in rural and remote settings who have limited access to a heart ultrasound (i.e echocardiogram) which is the ‘gold-standard’ test for HVD. Although the stethoscope is easy to use, the ability of most doctors to accurately detect clinically relevant murmurs is poor resulting in many patients with HVD going undiagnosed and therefore untreated. The objective of this project is to develop and evaluate the use of artificial intelligence techniques to automate the identification of cardiac murmurs and diagnosis of serious HVD from audio signals recorded using a digital stethoscope. This is likely to increase the uptake and improve the accuracy of screening for HVD, especially in environments with limited specialist resources.

Ramaciotti Health Investment Grants are awarded to individuals for a contribution towards the undertaking of health or medical research with the potential path to clinical application within five years. Grants are awarded by Perpetual, as trustee of the Ramaciotti Foundations, on the recommendation of the Ramaciotti Scientific Advisory Committee.

More information on the grant recipients can be found here.