Signal Processing Tools for Heart Sounds Analysis Based on Time-Frequency Domain

This paper present several signal processing tools for the analysis of heart sounds. Cardiac auscultation is noninvasive, low-cost and accurate to diagnose some heart diseases. A new module for the segmentation of heart sounds based on S-Transform is presented. The heart sound segmentation process divides the Phono Cardio Gram (PCG) signal into four parts: S1 (first heart sound), systole, S2 (second heart sound) and diastole. The segmentation can be considered one of the most important phases in the auto-analysis of PCG signals. A segmentation method based on the Shannon energy of the local spectrum calculated by the S-transform is proposed. Then, the energy concentration of the S-transform is optimized to accurately detect the boundaries of the localized sounds. New features based on the energy concentration of the S-transform are proposed to classify S1 and S2 and other features based on the complexity measure via Time-Frequency (TF) domain are proposed to detect systolic murmurs.