Heart Sound Analysis

PREFACE : Heart Disease is a major cause for increase in mortality rate today. Heart auscultation plays vital role in the diagnosis of heart diseases, especially valvular diseases. It is particularly important in primary health care, due to its effectiveness in detecting a wide range of heart abnormalities and to the low cost of the equipment involved. However, forming a diagnosis based on heart sounds is a skill that requires expertise. Particularly in remote areas and in developing country like India, physicians with the necessary training may not be widely available. The aim of writing this book is to develop heart sound analysis methods for a computerized cardiac auscultation system. The work focuses on classification and interpretation of features such as heart sounds, S1 and S2 location, the number of components for each heart sound, their frequency contents, and time interval between A2 and P2 (or split S2) etc., derived from the phonocardiogram (PCG) signal. A diagnosis based on heart auscultation is carried out by using advanced signal processing techniques like FT, STFT, CWT and DWT. Real time monitoring and analysis have been done using MATLAB Simulink Model.