A Complementary Tool for the Easy Detection of Cardiac Abnormalities

Z. Telatar, O. Eroğul and H.G. Ilk (Turkey)

Keywords

Phonocardiography, Wavelet, Compression,Time-Scale Expansion, WSOLA.

Abstract

In this study a complementary tool in the diagnosis of cardiac disorders and a novel approach for PCG (PhonoCardiogRaphy) waveform expansion are introduced. Time-scale modifications of phonocardiographic records of 20 different heart defects have been altered at different rates by using the Waveform Similarity Overlap-and-Add (WSOLA) and Multiresolutional Time Scale Modification (MTSM) algorithms. To assess the performance of the proposed method, subjective listening test (Mean Opinion Scores, MOS) has been applied to twenty expert physicians. The test results revealed that slowing-down the heart sounds improves physician's capability in recognition and discrimination of dissimilarities resulting from cardiac disorders. It can be concluded that the use of modified heart sounds could facilitate the cardiac auscultation and augment the education of physicians on the subject. In addition, the proposed method can be effectively utilized in ECG waveform compression.

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