The stethoscope has hung around doctors' necks for 210 years, and new research suggests the limiting factor is the ear at the other end of it. When five primary care clinicians listened to 357 at-risk patients with ordinary stethoscopes, they flagged 46.2 percent of the audible valve disease later confirmed by echocardiogram. Software analyzing the same hearts through a digital stethoscope flagged 92.3 percent.
Those findings, published in February in the European Heart Journal Digital Health, land as a coda to one of the more improbable origin stories in medicine. The instrument exists because a French physician in 1816 did not want to put his head on a young woman's chest.
