Detection of cardiac sounds components: a pilot study

This paper presents a preliminary study related to the detection and identification of cardiac sounds components including first sound (S1), second sound (S2) and murmurs. Detection and identification of cardiac sounds are an important process in automated cardiac sound analysis system in order to automatically diagnose people who are having cardiovascular disorder and determine the existence of murmurs. Sixteen of recorded cardiac sounds (eight normal cardiac sounds, four abnormal cardiac sounds with systole murmur, and four abnormal cardiac sounds with diastole murmur) from PASCAL Classifying Heart Sounds Challenge database were examined for analysis. This work is significant in studying the time and time-frequency based detection of cardiac sounds components characteristics. In time-based analysis, envelope of signal energy was used to do the peak detection of S1, S2 and murmur and also analysis of cardiac cycle, systole and diastole duration. While time-frequency based analysis was used to determine the S1, S2 and murmur frequency range. The findings yield the overall accuracy of envelope-based detection for normal cardiac sound signal at 60.85% while for abnormal cardiac sound signal at 57.24%