Class Determination Based on Kullback-Leibler Distance in Heart Sound Classification

Stethoscopic auscultation is still one of the primary tools for the diagnosis of heart diseases due to its easy accessibility and relatively low cost. It is, however, a difficult skill to acquire. Many research efforts have been done on the automatic classification of heart sound signals to support clinicians in heart sound diagnosis. Recently, hidden Markov models (HMMs) have been used quite successfully in the automatic classification of the heart sound signal. However, in the classification using HMMs, there are so many heart sound signal types that it is not reasonable to assign a new class to each of them. In this paper, rather than constructing an HMM for each signal type, we propose to build an HMM for a set of acoustically-similar signal types. To define the classes, we use the KL (Kullback-Leibler) distance between different signal types to determine if they should belong to the same class. From the classification experiments on the heart sound data consisting of 25 different types of signals, the proposed method proved to be quite efficient in determining the optimal set of classes. Also we found that the class determination approach produced better results than the heuristic class assignment method.