Correlation of Auscultatory Severity of Aortic Stenosis With Trans Thoracic Echocardiography

According to the 2006 ACC/AHA practice guidelines for valvular heart disease, patients with asymptomatic aortic stenosis(AS) should have screening transthoracic echocardiograms (TTE) performed annually for severe disease, every 1-2 years for moderate disease and every 3-5 years for mild disease. This results in a multitude of screening studies in the investigators patient population. 3M has developed a new stethoscope and phonocardiography software capable of identifying the peak intensity of the AS murmur and tracking it as it moves towards the second heart sound potentially indicating increasing severity of disease. Currently there exists no data to demonstrate that the aortic stenosis acceleration index (ASAI) correlates to disease severity or progression of disease. The ASAI measures the timing of the peak intensity of the systolic murmur and compares it to the total time in systole (S2-x/s2-s1) where s1 is the first heart sound; S2 is the second heart sound and x with the time between S1 and the peak intensity of the murmur. In this study the investigators propose to correlate the ASAI to standard TTE measurements of aortic stenosis severity.