Sonus Health: Calibrated Heart-Murmur Detection from Smartphone-Based Veterinary Auscultation

Abstract

Heart disease is among the most common serious conditions in dogs and cats, and a heart murmur heard on auscultation is one of the earliest signs of such disease; such murmurs are often subtle and challenging to detect at early stages. General-practice veterinary examinations catch only a fraction of these murmurs, and definitive cardiac assessment typically requires either a board-certified cardiologist or an in-clinic echocardiogram, which may involve cost and scheduling constraints. We describe Sonus Health, a smartphone-based screening system that analyses an auscultation recording of approximately thirty seconds or longer - captured by a pet owner at home or by a veterinarian or nurse in clinic - and returns a tiered result within moments. The system was evaluated on 322 veterinary-labelled recordings under standard out-of-fold cross-validation. For recordings assigned to the high-confidence tier (30% of cases), accuracy reaches 95.9%, with 94.0% sensitivity and 97.9% specificity. Uncertain cases are prospectively routed to veterinary review rather than assigned an automated classification. Results are stable across standard and group-aware cross-validation, a held-out test split, and multiple random seeds. Beyond murmur detection, the platform also estimates heart rate and heart rate variability, and we position it as a screening, triage, and longitudinal-monitoring layer for companion-animal cardiac care.