Transmission Perspective on the Mechanism of Coarse and Fine Crackle Sounds

The possibility of a normal distribution indicates that few particles are in the same phase during a breath and their reflections can be observed on the chest wall, then a few explosive waves with relatively large power occurr occasionally. Therefore, the one-cycle sine wave which is simulated as a single burst of the explosive effect phenomenon penetrates through the chest wall and was analysed to explore the reason of the crackle sounds. The results explain the differences between the definitions of crackle proposed by Sovijärvi et al. (2000a). The crackles in the lungs were synthesised by a computer simulation. When the coarse crackles occur, the results indicate that higher burst frequency carriers (greater than 100 Hz) directly penetrate the bandpass filter to simulate the chest wall. The simulated coarse crackle sounds were low pitched, with a high amplitude and long duration. The total duration was greater than 10 ms. However, for a lower frequency carrier (approximately 50 Hz), the fundamental frequency component was filtered out. Therefore, the second harmonic component of the lower frequency carrier, i.e., the fine crackle, penetrated the chest wall. Consequently, it is very possible that the normal lung sounds may contain many crackle-shaped waves with very small amplitudes because of the filtering effects of the chest wall, environment noises, electric devices, stethoscopes, and human ears, the small crackles disappear in the auscultations. In addition, our study pointed out that some unknown crackles of the very low frequency under the bandwidth of the human ears cannot penetrate the airways and be detected by medical doctors. Therefore, it might be necessary to focus advanced electronic instrumentation on them in order to analyse their possible characteristics for diagnosis and treatment of the respiration system.