Automated diagnosis of cardiac abnormalities using heart sounds

Abstract

Listening to the heart sounds is a common practice in identifying cardiac malfunctions. Since this method has many limitations, tools that aid physicians in their diagnosis of heart diseases are very useful. This paper presents a software tool to predict cardiac abnormalities which can be identified using heart sounds. Both heart sound information and symptoms are used in disease prediction. First audio inputs at four clinically important locations on the chest are acquired using an electronic stethoscope and entered to a database with symptoms for each patient. After de-noising, prominent features and statistical parameters needed for disease detection are extracted from the heart sound samples using several algorithms. Then the disease classification is performed to find out possible disease and murmur types. The software tool reported in this paper is capable of identifying normal heart sounds and abnormal heart sounds with possible kind of disease and murmurs presented there. Hence, it helps doctors to detect diseases early and can be integrated as a standard module of electronic stethoscope software.