The aim of this study is to describe a new false-alarm probability (FAP) bounded unified framework for segmentation of the phonocardiogram (PCG) signal sounds registered by an electronic stethoscope board. To meet this end, first the original PCG signal is pre-processed by application of an appropriate bandpass finite-duration impulse response (FIR) filter and then by implementation of a trous discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to the filtered signal for extracting several dyadic scales. Then, after choosing a proper scale, a fixed sample size sliding window is moved on the selected scale and in each slide, six feature vectors namely summation of the nonlinearly amplified Hilbert transform, summation of absolute first order differentiation, summation of absolute second-order differentiation, curve length, area and variance of the excerpted segment are calculated. Then, all feature trends are normalized and utilized to construct a newly proposed principal components analyzed geometric index (PCAGI) (to be used as the segmentation decision statistic (DS)) by application of a linear orthonormal projection. Next, using an adaptive smoothing filter (ASF), the obtained metric is modulated and freed from the fast fluctuations occurring in the vicinity of events onset and offset locations which consequently results in enhancement of edge detection accuracy. Later, histogram parameters of the filtered DS metric are used for the regulation of the α-level Neyman–Pearson classifier for FAP-bounded delineation of the PCG events. To assess the performance quality of the proposed PCG segmentation algorithm, the method was applied to all 85 records of Nursing Student Heart Sounds database including stenosis, insufficiency, regurgitation, gallop, septal defect, sound split, rumble, murmur, clicks, friction rub and snap disorders with different sampling frequencies. The method was also applied to the records obtained from an electronic stethoscope board designed for fulfillment of this study in the presence of high-level power-line noise and external disturbing sounds and as a result, no false positive or false negative errors were detected. High robustness against measurement noises of the electronic stethoscopes, acceptable detection-segmentation accuracy of PCG events in the presence of severe heart valvular and arrhythmic dysfunctions within a tolerable computational burden (processing time) and having no parameter dependency on the acquisition sampling frequency can be mentioned as important merits and capabilities of the proposed PCAGI-based PCG events detection-segmentation algorithm. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.