Cumulant-based trapezoidal basis selection for heart sound classification.

Past decades witnessed the expansion of linear signal processing methods in numerous biomedical applications. However, the nonlinear behavior of biomedical signals revived the interest in nonlinear signal processing methods such as higher-order statistics, in particular higher-order cumulants (HOC). In this paper, HOC are utilized toward heart sound classification. Heart sounds are presented by wavelet packet decomposition trees. Information measures are then defined based on HOC of wavelet packet coefficients, and three basis selection methods are proposed to prune the trees and preserve the most informative nodes for feature extraction. In addition, an approach is introduced to reduce the dimensionality of the search space from the whole wavelet packet tree to a trapezoidal sub-tree of it. This approach can be recommended for signals with a short frequency range. HOC features are extracted from the coefficients of selected nodes and fed into support vector machine classifier. Experimental data is a set of 59 heart sounds from different categories: normal heart sounds, mitral regurgitation, aortic stenosis, and aortic regurgitation. The promising results achieved indicate the capabilities of HOC of wavelet packet coefficients to capture nonlinear characteristics of the heart sounds to be used for basis selection.