[Current trends in phonoarthrography]

The detection of sounds from the human body for diagnostic purposes has a long history. In the respiratory and circulatory systems such auscultation is a precise science yielding much useful information. The detection and interpretation of joint sounds, however, has been much less successful in its development. In this paper we outline the history of joint auscultation, of phonoarthrography, and of their modern equivalent: vibration arthrography. The relative merits of acoustic and vibration based systems are discussed and these are illustrated with data from simultaneous recordings of several joint phenomena. Finally, we concluded that the future of phonoarthrography as a clinical test is based on its further development using accelerometers rather than microphones as detectors.