SCS awardees at annual Perinatal Congress

School of Clinical Sciences student, Ashwin Ramanathan, and Dr Lindsay Zhou, a neonatal fellow in Monash Newborn, Monash Children’s Hospital and a tutor in the Department of Paediatrics, have taken out awards at the annual Perinatal Society of Australia and New Zealand (PSANZ) Congress held on the Gold Coast last week.


Ashwin, whose research is on using ‘Digital stethoscope technology to study breath sounds at birth’ took out the New Investigator Award for Best Poster in the student category, as well as the PSANZ President's Award for the best overall Poster in the congress.

Lindsay also won a New Investigator Award for Best Poster in Neonatology. Lindsay's research focused on studying the characteristics of preterm and term breath sounds, again using digital stethoscope technology.

Dr Atul Malhotra, a senior lecturer in the Department of Paediatrics and Consultant Neonatologist, Monash Children's Hospital supervised both Ashwin and Lindsay and says that digital health technology and artificial intelligence are likely to play a major role in medicine in the future. He also adds:

“It is fantastic to see various craft groups and organisations embrace this technology already”.

Dr Malhotra and his team are currently running the "Neo Auscultate" project using digital stethoscope technology in preterm infants, which has been ably supported by Dr Faezeh Marzbanrad and her team from the Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering at Monash University.

Read their review article on Digital stethoscopes in paediatric medicine here.