Lung Acoustics

Biomedical computing is one of my recent research focus areas. We have analyzed the propagation of sound in the human thorax using highly detailed parallel simulations. An in-house parallel finite-difference code was developed for solving the inhomogeneous wave equation and the tissue density data is based on the visible human data from the National Library of Medicine. Some results are shown below.More details of this study are available in a recent Masters thesis (Narasimhan 2002) and a recently submitted manuscript (Narasimhan et al. 2002).

An example CT image and the corresponding density image.

References:

Narasimhan, C., (2002). A parallel supercomputer model for sound propagation in the human thorax, MS Thesis, Dept. of Civil Engineering, North Carolina State University.

Narasimhan C., Ward R.C, Kruse K.L., Guddati M., and Mahinthakumar* G., A high resolution computer model for sound propagation in the human thorax based on the visible human data set, submitted to Computers in Biology and Medicine, October 2002.

Narasimhan C., G. Mahinthakumar, R.Ward, and K. Kruse, A computational model for sound propagation in the human lung (powerpoint presentation), presented at the Biomedical Engineering Society Annual Meeting (BMES 2001), Durham, North Carolina, October 2001.