Selection of dynamic features based on time-frequency representations for heart murmur detection from phonocardiographic signals.

This work discusses a method for the selection of dynamic features, based on the calculation of the spectral power through time applied to the detection of systolic murmurs from phonocardiographic recordings. To investigate the dynamic properties of the spectral power during murmurs, several quadratic energy distributions have been studied, namely Wigner-Ville, Choi-Williams, smoothed pseudo Wigner-Ville, exponential, and hyperbolic T-distribution. The classification performance has been compared with that using a Short Time Fourier Transform and Continuous Wavelet Transform representations. Furthermore, this work discusses a variety of nonparametric techniques to estimate the spectral power contours as dynamic features that characterize the heart sounds (HS): instantaneous energy, eigenvectors, instantaneous frequency, equivalent bandwidth, subband spectral centroids, and Mel cepstral coefficients. In this way, the aforementioned time-frequency representations and their dynamic features were evaluated by means of their ability to detect the presence of murmurs using a simple k-Nearest Neighbors classifier. Moreover, the relevancies of the proposed dynamic features have been evaluated using a time-varying principal component analysis. The work presented is carried out using a database containing 22 phonocardiographic recordings (16 normal and 6 records with murmurs), segmented to extract 402 representative individual beats (201 per class). The results suggest that the smoothing given by the quadratic energy distribution significantly improves the classification performance for the detection of murmurs in HS. Moreover, it is shown that the power dynamic features which give the best overall classification performance are the MFCC contours. As a result, the proposed method can be implemented as a simple diagnostic tool for primary health-care purposes with high accuracy (up to 98%) discriminating between normal and pathologic beats.