Heart sound classification using Gaussian mixture model

This article represents a new method of classifying the heart sound status using the loudness features from the heart sound.

The method includes the following 3 main steps. First, the heart sound, which is usually found noisy, is heavily filtered by a 6th-order Chebyshev-I filter. The heart sound is then segmented using the event synchronous method to separate the sounds into the first heart sound, the systole and the second heart sound, the diastole. In the second step, the heart sound features namely maximum loudness index and minimum loudness index are obtained from the spectrogram of the sound by taking the row means. As a third step, the heart sound is classified using the Gaussian mixture model approach to categorize the sounds.

This method has been tested on a very large database of heart sounds consisting of over 3000 heart sounds recordings with a success rate of 97.77%.

Only 2 features are used in this method namely, minimum loudness index and maximum loudness index. Classification of sounds using these 2 features yields high accuracy even under noisy conditions and is comparable to any state-of-the-art technique.