Image Description:

Diagram Pathophysiology of Breath Sounds

This illustration shows that when you breathe, air moving through the airways creates turbulent flow that produce unique sounds. In healthy lungs, this sound is filtered and softened as it travels through normal lung tissue before reaching the chest wall, where a clinician can hear it with a stethoscope.

When something changes inside the lungs, whether that is fluid accumulation, inflammation, narrowed airways, or collapsed tissue, the way sound is generated and transmitted changes with it. Each type of structural change produces a characteristic pattern of breath sounds, either altering the normal sounds or creating entirely new ones. These abnormal sounds, known as adventitious sounds, give clinicians direct acoustic clues about what is happening inside the lung without needing to look inside it

Image File Sizes:

Anatomy Visible in the Medical Illustration Includes:

breath, sounds, breathing, vesicular, bronchial, wheeze, crackles, stridor, ronchi.

Image created by:

Joanna Culley