Development and Validation of a New Method for Noninvasive Diagnosis of LUTS

Lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS) affect selfassessed quality of life. The aim of this study is to acquire useful information of LUTS diagnosis thorough uroflow and urophonography signal as a non-invasive method. This study proposed a method of measuring uroflow and urophonography at the same time for more accurate diagnosis in case uroflow looks normal due to compensatory function hypertrophy in the expression of early lower urinary tract obstruction. In case of early obstruction, there happens turbulent uroflow by the obstruction even if the uroflow looks normal and thus obstruction can be detected by measuring and analyzing urophonography noise caused by turbulent flow. We implemented a system that can measure both uroflow and urophonography, and evaluated its performance using experimental apparatus simulating the lower urinary tract system. In the experiment, we observed changes in uroflow and urophonography according to artificial pressure and the degree of obstruction, and confirmed that it is possible to determine the effect of compensatory function hypertrophy by analyzing urophonographyic parameter under the same uroflow. The results of our experiment show that the effect of compensatory function hypertrophy in the early-stage obstruction of lower urinary tract, which is not detectible with uroflowmetry alone, can be assessed through urophonographic analysis.