Velcro Lung

An evening of conversation, soundscapes and hands-on demonstrations

The sound of Velcro ripping apart is also the sound of the lung disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) as heard through a stethoscope. Professor Luca Richeldi is fighting this disease which kills more people each year than breast cancer, has no known cause, with very few treatments available.

Professor Richeldi took to the stage at the Winchester Discovery Centre to explain how a career treating and researching rare lung diseases has seen one of the very simplest, centuries-old medical tests – listening to the chest - become a focus for advancing understanding and care of lung disease.

Modena to Southampton: a career fighting lung fibrosis

Professor of respiratory medicine and honorary consultant at Southampton, Luca was born and bred in Modena, Italy, where he remains director of the Centre for Rare Lung Diseases. In Southampton he is developing new clinics to improve care of interstitial lung diseases like IPF and collaborating with engineers at the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR) to improve early detection.

New technologies for detecting lung disease

Prof Richeldi believes the ability to identify distinctive sounds from the lungs alerts clinicians to people who might be developing the early stages of the disease.

“Nationally, the number of people suffering from ILD is increasing by thousands every year, but the cause is often unknown and, as a result, the majority of patients are diagnosed late when their life expectancy has been cut extremely short,” explained Prof Richeldi.

“We think that electronic stethoscopes, which are currently used widely to monitor the heart, can identify people with early signs of ILD long before they become symptomatic – and early diagnosis of the disease is key to making a difference.”

Prof Richeldi was joined by Dr Anna Barney from the ISVR, giving direct insight into the innovative work of the ISVR and explain the spectrograms that are used to visually represent the lung recordings.

Sounds from down the stethoscope

A set of 3M Littman electronic stethoscopes were on hand, for audience members to test their diagnostic abilities by listening to  a range of real-life lung recordings, and to hear the sensitivity difference between digital and conventional stethoscopes.

“My ambition is for lung sounds - properly recorded, analysed and stored - as a standard part of a patient’s health assessment and for this to be performed in GP surgeries.”

Roy Bush, an IPF patient in professor Richeldi's care and part of his presentation volunteered to have his lung sounds recorded live. Performed with one of the digital stethoscopes and played back through the Centre's speakers, Roy's sound sample gave the audience a dramatic and direct sense of what Prof Richeldi is aiming to detect.