Learning Heart and Lung Sounds
Internet Educational Resources
Cardiac Auscultation
 
Blaufuss Multimedia – Heart Sounds and Murmurs
Excellent tutorial on heart sounds with animated phonocardiograms that visually demonstrate heart sounds. Covers four major valvular lesions including aortic regrugitation, aortic stenosis, mitral regurgitation and mitral stenosis. Each section shows an animation of a patient's chest and neck, plays the heart sound and shows a concurrent animation of the phonocardiogram and pulse diagram. Excellent resource for integrating the physical findings for each major valvular lesion. Also includes heart sounds quiz. Requires Flash Player.
Best Features:
Visual animations concurrent with heart sounds for each valvular lesion.
 
Family Practice.com - click on HeartLab™
This is one of the most comprehensive sites for heart sounds and cardiac auscultation. It contains a text tutorial of the cardiac cycle, landmarks, and normal and abnormal sounds. The audio simulator allows the user to click on the aortic, pulmonic, tricuspid, and mitral areas to hear for normal heart sounds, clicks, murmurs, and gallops. Each sound sequence is accompanied by explanatory text.
 
This 18 minute video from the University of Virginia is one of the most thorough videos on the cardiac exam. It allows a close-up observation of a cardiac exam, including how to interpret pulses, inspect, palpate, auscultate the chest, and verbal instruction on how to listen to different heart sounds (although it does not include actual heart sounds). The physician in the video is very thorough and explains each step and the purpose behind it. Video quality is quite good. Quicktime and high-speed internet connection required.
 
This student-designed site from UCLA provides a text tutorial along with a large collection of audio files that allows the student to hear heart sounds as they read about the conditions that produce it. Excellent for learning how to distinguish between various heart sounds, as well as understand the mechanics that are producing abnormal sounds.
Lung Auscultation
The following are a list of web sites that will allow you to review and listen to actual recordings of normal and abnormal lung sounds.
 
The RALE Repository presents digital recordings of respiratory sounds in health and disease.  These are breath sounds that doctors, nurses, respiratory and physical therapist hear with a stethoscope when they auscultate the chest of a patient.
 
This site was designed by a fourth year of medical student while at UCLA, primarily for second-year medical students to help them appreciate the different audio characteristics of heart murmurs and breath sounds.   The Auscultation Assistant provides heart murmurs, heart sounds, and breath sounds to help others improve their physical diagnosis.
 
Easy to use site with exceptional acoustics.  Has audible representations of normal lung sounds, crackles, wheezes, voice sounds and an area to compare normal with abnormal lung sounds.
 
A comprehensive physical examination and clinical education site for medical students and other health care professionals. Excellent written and pictoral representation of the complete pulmonary exam.  Listen to lungs sounds at an excellent link through this site at UC Davis. Listen to more lungs sounds from Rales Repository of Lung Sounds. ...
 
This 12 minute video from the University of North Carolina is part of their series of a high-quality, well-designed videos that are very useful in familiarizing students with general clinical exams. It addresses the specifics of exam technique, common courtesies to extend to patients, and tips to improve the efficacy of exams and procedures. This video familiarizes students with the anatomy of the respiratory system, procedure of the pulmonary exam, and diagnosis of abnormal conditions. It covers the standard sequence of inspection, palpation, percussion, and auscultation of the chest and lungs. The video quality is quite good. RealPlayer required.