Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 9, 2026
Conducting Respiratory Oscillometry in an Outpatient Setting
Published on: April 8, 2022
Brief report: pulmonary auscultation in the operating room: a prospective randomized blinded trial comparing
Clement Hoffmann1, Elisabeth Falzone, Catherine Verret
1From the Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, Percy Military Teaching Hospital, Clamart; French Military Institute of Biomedical Research Brétigny-sur-Orge; Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, Begin Military Teaching Hospital, Saint Mandé Burns Treatment Center, Percy Military Teaching Hospital, Clamart; Emergency Medical Service, Paris Fire Brigade, Paris; and Department of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care Medicine, Val-de-Grace Military Teaching Hospital, Paris, France.
Background:
We compared the subjective quality of pulmonary auscultation between 2 acoustic stethoscopes (Holtex Ideal® and Littmann Cardiology III®) and an electronic stethoscope (Littmann 3200®) in the operating room.
Methods:
A prospective double-blind randomized study with an evaluation during mechanical ventilation was performed in 100 patients. After each examination, the listeners using a numeric scale (0-10) rated the quality of auscultation. Auscultation quality was compared in patients among stethoscopes with a multilevel mixed-effects linear regression with random intercept (operator effect), adjusted on significant factors in univariate analysis. A significant difference was defined as P < 0.05.
Results:
One hundred comparative evaluations of pulmonary auscultation were performed. The quality of auscultation was rated 8.2 ± 1.6 for the electronic stethoscope, 7.4 ± 1.8 for the Littmann Cardiology III, and 4.6 ± 1.8 for the Holtex Ideal. Compared with Holtex Ideal, auscultation quality was significantly higher with other stethoscopes (P < 0.0001). Compared with Littmann Cardiology III, auscultation quality was significantly higher with Littmann 3200 electronic stethoscope (β = 0.9 [95% confidence interval, 0.5-1.3]).
Conclusions:
An electronic stethoscope can provide a better quality of pulmonary auscultation than acoustic stethoscopes in the operating room, yet with a magnitude of improvement marginally higher than that provided with a high performance acoustic stethoscope. Whether this can translate into a clinically relevant benefit requires further studies.
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