Automated Heart Murmur Detection using Sound Processing Techniques

Abstract

The technological progress in computer science (particularly, in machine learning) has contributed to the improvement of medical services, both in detecting and treating diseases. The large volumes of data, that are overwhelming for human experts (doctors, nurses), can easily be managed by automated systems, as long as we have the computational resources. Obviously, human experts are still essential in the process - we think of the use of computer science in medicine as a collaboration between medical staff and artificial intelligence. The usual types of data that can be processed by automated systems are text, sound, and image types. In this paper, we approach the diagnosis subject and focus on data consisting of sound. We created a heart murmur detection system - it analyzes recordings and tells the user whether the sound samples indicate a heart murmur or not, based on a trained machine learning model. One of the main advantages of our system is the fact that we ran a large number of experiments, with different configurations of denoising techniques and features taken into consideration. We were able to draw some interesting conclusions, for example, we found out which features are the most important for the classification and which features are not worth computing. Also, our work denotes a thorough understanding of sound processing.