Raymond L. Watrous

           Adjunct Assistant Professor

Introduction

Ray is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (BSEE, PhD) with a background in speech recognition and signal processing. His dissertation in Computer Science investigated connectionist models for phoneme recognition. For many years, he was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff at Siemens Corporate Research in Princeton, NJ where he was engaged in speech recognition and biomedical signal processing research and development. While at Siemens, he was instrumental in developing a new technology for computer-aided auscultation of the heart. He was further instrumental in 2001 in spinning out this technology into Zargis Medical Corp. where he is Chief Scientist.

Zargis subsequently brought the computer-aided auscultation technology to realization in CardioScan, an FDA-cleared product that assists primary care physicians in the interpretation of heart sounds and referral of patients with heart murmurs. Cardioscan was recognized jointly with the 3M Littmann Model 3200 BlueTooth stethoscope as the Popular Science 2009 Innovation of the Year, and received the 2010 Edison Gold Award for Innovation, the Medical Design Excellence Gold Award and the red-dot best-of-the-best product design award.

Ray is currently co-teaching the ESE Senior Design Course with Prof. Ken Laker and Peter Scott and is organizing an independent study course in computational modeling for the Spring, 2011 semester.

Research Interests

Ray is currently interested in developing computational models of the cardiovascular system as a means of gaining insights into cardiovascular physiology and the processes by which heart sounds and murmurs are generated.  He is collaborating with colleagues at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in developing patient-adaptive models that will enable cardiologists to improve the long-term management of patients with complex congenital heart disease. He is also interested in developing computational models with intuitive user interfaces that will provide medical students with an interactive tool for learning cardiovascular physiology and auscultation of the heart.

At Zargis, he is interested in developing algorithms to detect acoustic properties of heart sounds which are correlated with physiological variables in order to assess cardiovascular health and the severity of valvular heart disease. He is continuing the development of algorithms which detect and characterize heart sounds in order to provide quantitative and objective information that will help physicians improve their clinical decision making. Ray is interested in the application of this technology to earlier detection of latent heart disease, better cardiovascular healthcare for women in pregnancy, improved preparticipation sports screening, accurate and cost-effective referral for echocardiography, and improving the efficiency and diagnostic focus of the echocardiography evaluation of patients with murmurs.

Selected Publications

A. J. Chin, K. K. Whitehead and R. L. Watrous, "Insights after 40 years of the Fontan Operation". World Journal of Pediatric and Congenital Heart Surgery, Sep. 27, 2010 vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 328-343.

R. L. Watrous, “A Computational Model of Cardiovascular Physiology and Heart Sound Generation”. 31st Annu. Int. Conf. IEEE Eng. in Medicine and Biology Soc., Minneapolis, MN, 2009, pp. 3105-10.

R. L. Watrous, W. R. Thompson and S. J. Ackerman, “The Impact of Computer-Assisted Auscultation on Physician Referrals of Asymptomatic Patients with Heart Murmurs,” Clin. Cardiol., vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 79-83, Feb. 2008.

R. L. Watrous, “Computer-Aided Auscultation of the Heart: From Anatomy and Physiology to Diagnostic Decision Support”. 28th Annu. Int. Conf. IEEE Eng. in Medicine and Biology Soc., New York, NY, 2006, pp. 140-143.

C. Fearon, S. Rickard and R. L. Watrous, “Multichannel Phonocardiogram Source Separation and Localization,” Proc. 3rd European Medical & Biological Eng. Conf., Prague, Czech Republic, 2005, pp. 4338-4342.

R. L. Watrous, J. Bedynek, T. Oskiper and D. M. Grove, “Computer-Assisted Detection of Systolic Murmurs Associated with Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy: A Pilot Study,” Texas Heart Institute Journal, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 368-375, Nov. 2004.

L. Gamero and R. L. Watrous, “Detection of the First and Second Heart Sound Using Probabilistic Models,” 25th Annu. Int. Conf. IEEE Eng. in Medicine and Biology Soc., Cancun, Mexico, 2003, pp. 2877-80.

T. Oskiper and R. L. Watrous, “Results on the Time-frequency Characterization of the First Heart Sound in Normal Man,” 2nd Joint Conf. IEEE Eng. in Medicine and Biology Soc. and the Biomedical Eng. Soc., Houston, TX, 2002, pp. 126-127.
 

Curriculum Vitae

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