ABSTRACT
This chapter answers the following question: how correctly and consistently do physicians and medical students evaluate respiratory sounds, and do they categorize them identically? Physicians often use words to describe perceived pathologies in the respiratory system that are associated with distinct semantic meanings in different handbooks or universities. This leads to problems in preliminary auscultation courses, and more importantly during later professional work, when doctors exchange or consult diagnoses. They use different descriptions of the same sounds or semantically similar and sometimes even identical terms to describe distinct phenomena. The class of inspiratory and expiratory wheezes is marked almost as often as the rhonchi class. Additionally, for the rhonchi class a louder breath sound and prolonged expiration phase were also often marked. The comparison of the results of correct answers for the detailed classification and the classification with the grouped classes shows that grouping according to ERS, ILSA and ATS nomenclature significantly increases the percentage of correct responses.
