Processing of the Phonocardiographic Signal : methods for the intelligent stethoscope

Abstract: Phonocardiographic signals contain bioacoustic information reflecting the operation of the heart. Normally there are two heart sounds, and additional sounds indicate disease. If a third heart sound is present it could be a sign of heart failure whereas a murmur indicates defective valves or an orifice in the septal wall. The primary aim of this thesis is to use signal processing tools to improve the diagnostic value of this information. More specifically, three different methods have been developed:• A nonlinear change detection method has been applied to automatically detect heart sounds. The first and the second heart sounds can be found using recurrence times of the first kind while the third heart sound can be found using recurrence times of the second kind. Most third heart sound occurrences were detected (98 %), but the amount of false extra detections was rather high (7 % of the heart cycles).• Heart sounds obscure the interpretation of lung sounds. A new method based on nonlinear prediction has been developed to remove this undesired disturbance. High similarity was obtained when comparing actual lung sounds with lung sounds after removal of heart sounds.• Analysis methods such as Shannon energy, wavelets and recurrence quantification analysis were used to extract information from the phonocardiographic signal. The most prominent features, determined by a feature selection method, were used to create a new feature set for heart murmur classification. The classification result was 86 % when separating patients with aortic stenosis, mitral insufficiency and physiological murmurs.The derived methods give reasonable results, and they all provide a step forward in the quest for an intelligent stethoscope, a universal phonocardiography tool able to enhance auscultation by improving sound quality, emphasizing abnormal events in the heart cycle and distinguishing different heart murmurs.