Automated Signal Quality Assessment for Heart Sound Signal by Novel Features and Evaluation in Open Public Datasets

Transfer Learning Models for Detecting Six Categories of Phonocardiogram Recordings

Background and aims: Auscultation is a cheap and fundamental technique for detecting cardiovascular disease effectively. Doctors’ abilities in auscultation are varied. Sometimes, there may be cases of misdiagnosis, even when auscultation is performed by an experienced doctor. Hence, it is necessary to propose accurate computational tools to assist auscultation, especially in developing countries. Artificial intelligence technology can be an efficient diagnostic tool for detecting cardiovascular disease. This work proposed an automatic multiple classification method for cardiovascular disease detection by heart sound signals. Methods and results: In this work, a 1D heart sound signal is translated into its corresponding 3D spectrogram using continuous wavelet transform (CWT). In total, six classes of heart sound data are used in this experiment. We combine an open database (including five classes of heart sound data: aortic stenosis, mitral regurgitation, mitral stenosis, mitral valve prolapse and normal) with one class (pulmonary hypertension) of heart sound data collected by ourselves to perform the experiment. To make the method robust in a noisy environment, the background deformation technique is used before training. Then, 10 transfer learning networks (GoogleNet, SqueezeNet, DarkNet19, MobileNetv2, Inception-ResNetv2, DenseNet201, Inceptionv3, ResNet101, NasNet-Large, and Xception) are used for comparison. Furthermore, other models (LSTM and CNN) are also compared with our proposed algorithm. The experimental results show that four transfer learning networks (ResNet101, DenseNet201, DarkNet19 and GoogleNet) outperformed their peer models with an accuracy of 0.98 to detect the multiple heart diseases. The performances have been validated both in the original heart sound and the augmented heart sound using 10-fold cross validation. The results of these 10 folds are reported in this research. Conclusions: Our method obtained high classification accuracy even under a noisy background, which suggests that the proposed classification method could be used in auxiliary diagnosis for cardiovascular diseases.

Classification of heart sounds based on quality assessment and wavelet scattering transform

Automatic classification of heart sound plays an important role in the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases. In this study, a heart sound sample classification method based on quality assessment and wavelet scattering transform was proposed. First, the ratio of zero crossings (RZC) and the root mean square of successive differences (RMSSD) were used for assessing the quality of heart sound signal. The first signal segment conforming to the threshold standard was selected as the current sample for the continuous heart sound signal. Using the wavelet scattering transform, the wavelet scattering coefficients were expanded according to the wavelet scale dimension, to obtain the features. Support vector machine (SVM) was used for classification, and the classification results for the samples were obtained using the wavelet scale dimension voting approach. The effects of RZC and RMSSD on the results are discussed in detail. On the database of PhysioNet Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2016 (CinC 2016), the proposed method yields 92.23% accuracy (Acc), 96.62% sensitivity (Se), 90.65% specificity (Sp), and 93.64% measure of accuracy (Macc). The results show that the proposed method can effectively classify normal and abnormal heart sound samples with high accuracy.