Heartbeats and murmurs

This week’s Nerdcore Medical collab is a paired poster for October’s Hearbeats and heart attacks poster. The last poster showed the EKG wave patterns of 10 different heart conditions, as well as the different parts of a normal EKG wave. This new poster shows the PCG patterns of 11 more heart-related diseases.

EKG waves (also called an ECG) shows the heart’s electrical activity, while a PCG uses a phonocardiograph to plot the sounds produced by the heart. So even though these two posters are made with similar design styles and fonts, the waves look completely different.

Since PCG waves can be a little more hard to decipher as a graphic, I replicated each wave three different times to show the various sections of the sound waves. The first heartbeat graphic shows just the S1 and S2 parts of the PCG wave. The second shows the S1 & S2 combined with the PCG systole sound, and the third wave illustrates the entire sound wave. I also included a small heart illustration showing the anatomical defects that cause each of the different diseases in the infographic.

• Sources

• First Aid for the USMLE Books 1 & 2 (2015). Tao Le and Vikas Bhushan. © 2014 McGraw-Hill Education.
• Heart sounds and lung sounds © 2016 Medical Training and Simulation LLC.
• Patent ductus arteriosus. NIH U.S. National Library of Medicine.