Heart sound classification based on equal scale frequency cepstral coefficients and deep learning.

Journal: Biomedizinische Technik. Biomedical engineering
Published Date:

Abstract

Heart diseases represent a serious medical condition that can be fatal. Therefore, it is critical to investigate the measures of its early prevention. The Mel-scale frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) feature has been widely used in the early diagnosis of heart abnormity and achieved promising results. During feature extraction, the Mel-scale triangular overlapping filter set is applied, which makes the frequency response more in line with the human auditory property. However, the frequency of the heart sound signals has no specific relationship with the human auditory system, which may not be suitable for processing of heart sound signals. To overcome this issue and obtain a more objective feature that can better adapt to practical use, in this work, we propose an equal scale frequency cepstral coefficients (EFCC) feature based on replacing the Mel-scale filter set with a set of equally spaced triangular overlapping filters. We further designed classifiers combining convolutional neural network (CNN), recurrent neural network (RNN) and random forest (RF) layers, which can extract both the spatial and temporal information of the input features. We evaluated the proposed algorithm on our database and the PhysioNet Computational Cardiology (CinC) 2016 Challenge Database. Results from ten-fold cross-validation reveal that the EFCC-based features show considerably better performance and robustness than the MFCC-based features on the task of classifying heart sounds from novel patients. Our algorithm can be further used in wearable medical devices to monitor the heart status of patients in real time with high precision, which is of great clinical importance.

Authors

  • Xiaoqing Chen
    College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China.
  • Hongru Li
    Shengli Clinical Medical College of Fujian Medical University, Fuzhou, China.
  • Youhe Huang
    College of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China.
  • Weiwei Han
    Department of Anal Surgery, Affiliated Hospital of Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Jinan, Shandong, China.
  • Xia Yu
    Department of Ultrasound, Weihai Maternal and Child Health Hospital, Weihai, China.
  • Pengfei Zhang
    Key Laboratory of Cardiovascular Remodeling and Function Research, Chinese Ministry of Education and Chinese National Health Commission, Department of Cardiology, Qilu Hospital of Shandong University. N0.107 Wenhuaxi Road, Jinan, Shanodng Province, China. Electronic address: pengf-zhang@163.com.
  • Rui Tao
    Department of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, The Second Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University, Hefei, China.