DPPAT: Dual-Level Periodic Pattern-Aware Transformer for Heart Sound Murmur Identification

Developing heart sound classification algorithms for murmur identification is critical for early screening of heart diseases. However, identifying murmurs in long-duration heart sound signals can be challenging due to their weak features and interference from noise. Considering the periodic patterns of heart sounds and murmurs, periodic priors can be introduced to enhance murmur identification, an approach that remains underutilized in current methods. In this study, we propose a novel Dual-level Periodic Pattern-Aware Transformer (DPPAT) to implicitly leverage the periodic priors of heart sound signals without requiring cycle segmentation. In the regional-level, an Adaptive Period-Aligned Window Selection algorithm is designed for the model to extract periodic components while suppressing random noise using a Periodic Pattern Attention module. In the global-level, the model further integrates these periodic features in global-modeling to enhance the identification of murmur-discriminative features. Validated on the dataset from 2022 George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenge, our proposed method achieves a weighted accuracy of 84.27% and an F1-score of 70.38% through 10-fold cross-validation. The generalizability of DPPAT is further verified on two additional public datasets, including both heart sound and respiratory sound signals. Furthermore, attention visualizations provide a clear understanding of the focus of the model, highlighting the decision-making basis for murmur identification.