RAPID: Screening and Prognosis of COVID-19 by a Novel RF Stethoscope

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought disasters to our society, but the public screening technology as our first line of defense remains weak. Fever alone is not sufficient; difficulty in breathing, chest pain and anosmia rely on self report, and hence not reliable or accurate. However, without effective and fast screening against respiratory contagious diseases, it is difficult to resume normal social contacts without serious concerns of a new wave of COVID-19 infection or a new coronavirus that causes equal or more damages. The source of symptomatic observation of COVID-19 is pneumonia. The tissue inflammation causes fever and anosmia; the congestion from water in lung tissues causes difficulty in breathing and chest pain. Human respiration, like many other body functions, will self compensate in the presence of damaged tissues, which makes the early stage of pneumonia ?asymptomatic? under the present screening criteria. This project seeks to develop and test an effective sensor technology to detect the lung tissue damage using radio-frequency (RF) signals. The technology borrows the ideas of listening to breathing sounds by century-old stethoscopes. Damaged tissues in the lung and airway will cause abnormal sounds, or different tissue vibration characteristics, that can be identified quickly as another indication of COVID-19 infection. However, conventional stethoscopes require bare skin contact for quality recording and quiet ambience to minimize interference. The project will develop a new RF stethoscope, which can measure tissue vibration characteristics over clothing and can operate reliably in very noisy environment such as public transits. The research will build a database of breathing features from healthy and confirmed COVID-19 patients. Based on the mature wireless technologies, the radio stethoscope can be inexpensively and broadly deployed. The user can go to a checkpoint and finish the screening within a few seconds for early screening of COVID-19. Further pathological tests and social isolation can then follow through the necessary management of this pandemic. This new RF stethoscope technology provides a fast and convenient way to measure lung tissue vibration characteristics and can be applied to other healthcare applications related to cardiopulmonary functions.

This project aims to establish a symptomatic screening and continuous prognosis platform for COVID-19 by a novel RF stethoscope, which can be deployed as a fast and cost-effective screening in public transit and as a recurrent prognosis tool in point-of-care facilities or at home. The sensing modality in the proposed method is the lung tissue vibration characteristics which will change in all stages of a pneumonia. The method is similar to that of the conventional acoustic stethoscope, but the readout is by the RF signals instead of the sound signals. A small amount of the electromagnetic energy will be coupled deeply into the trachea, bronchus and lung parenchyma by the RF sensing probes over clothing, and the tissue vibration features will be measured to distinguish healthy persons from potential COVID-19 patients by the tissue viscoelasticity and water content. The major research tasks include the RF sensor development, testing on healthy adults, and long-term continuous monitoring of potential COVID-19 patients at the Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City. Features for COVID-19 infection will be distinguished against the normal breathing database by auscultation physiology and machine learning methods.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.