• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.27 no.2E
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• pp.57-63
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• 2008

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.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.144-152
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• 2007

Conventional research works on the classification of the heart sound signal have been done mainly with the artificial neural networks. But the analysis results on the statistical characteristic of the heart sound signal have shown that the HMM is suitable for modeling the heart sound signal. In this paper, we model the various heart sound signals representing different heart diseases with the HMM and find that the classification rate is much affected by the clustering of the heart sound signal. Also, the heart sound signal acquired in real environments is a continuous signal without any specified starting and ending points of time. Hence, for the classification based on the HMM, the continuous cyclic heart sound signal needs to be manually segmented to obtain isolated cycles of the signal. As the manual segmentation will incur the errors in the segmentation and will not be adequate for real time processing, we propose a variant of the ergodic HMM which does not need segmentation procedures. Simulation results show that the proposed method successfully classifies continuous heart sounds with high accuracy.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.28 no.1
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• pp.32-43
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• 2009

In this paper, we improve the performance of cardiac disorder classification by continuous heart sound signals using automatic segmentation and extreme learning machine (ELM). The accuracy of the conventional cardiac disorder classification systems degrades because murmurs and click sounds contained in the abnormal heart sound signals cause incorrect or missing starting points of the first (S1) and the second heart pulses (S2) in the automatic segmentation stage, In order to reduce the performance degradation due to segmentation errors, we find the positions of the S1 and S2 pulses, modify them using the time difference of S1 or S2, and extract a single period of heart sound signals. We then obtain a feature vector consisting of the mel-scaled filter bank energy coefficients and the envelope of uniform-sized sub-segments from the single-period heart sound signals. To classify the heart disorders, we use ELM with a single hidden layer. In cardiac disorder classification experiments with 9 cardiac disorder categories, the proposed method shows the classification accuracy of 81.6% and achieves the highest classification accuracy among ELM, multi-layer perceptron (MLP), support vector machine (SVM), and hidden Markov model (HMM).

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.29 no.2
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• pp.133-140
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• 2010

We improve the performance of cardiac disorder classification by adding new temporal features extracted from continuous heart sound signals. We add three kinds of novel temporal features to a conventional feature based on mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC): Heart sound envelope, murmur probabilities, and murmur amplitude variation. In cardiac disorder classification and detection experiments, we evaluate the contribution of the proposed features to classification accuracy and select proper temporal features using the sequential feature selection method. The selected features are shown to improve classification accuracy significantly and consistently for neural network-based pattern classifiers such as multi-layer perceptron (MLP), support vector machine (SVM), and extreme learning machine (ELM).

• Journal of the Institute of Convergence Signal Processing
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.134-138
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• 2015

Heart sound is used for a basic clinical examination to check for abnormalities in the lungs and heart that can be heard with a stethoscope or phonocardiography. In this paper, we try to find an easier and non-invasive method to diagnose heart diseases using neural network classifier. The classifier has been developed for one normal heart sound and five murmurs by using Shannon entropy and conjugate scaled back propagation algorithm. The experimental results showed that the classification is possible with 1.63185e-6 of classification error.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.144-150
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• 2006

Clinicians usually use stethoscopic auscultation for the diagnosis of heart diseases. However, the heart sound signal has varying characteristics due to the noise and/or the conditions of the patients. Also, it is not easy for junior clinicians to find the acoustical differences between different kinds or heart sound signals. which may result in errors in the diagnosis. Thus it will be quite useful for the clinicians to make use of an automatic classification system using signal processing techniques. In this paper, we propose to use hidden Markov models in stead of artificial neural networks which have been conventionally used for the automatic classification of heart sounds. In the experiments classifying heart sound signals. we could see that the proposed methods were quite successful in the classification accuracy.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2007.10a
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• pp.101-102
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• 2007

Heart diseases are critical and should be detected as soon as possible. A stethoscope is a simple device to find cardiac disorder but requires keen experiences in heart sounds. We evaluate a cardiac disorder classifier by using heart sounds recorded by a digital wireless stethoscope developed in this work. The classifier uses hidden Markov models with circular state transition to model the heart sounds. We train the classifier using two kinds of data: One recorded by using our stethoscope and the other sampled from a clean heart sound database. In classification experiments using 165 sound clips, the classifier shows the classification accuracy of 82% in classifying 6 cardiac disorder categories.

• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1997 no.11
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• pp.75-78
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• 1997

In this paper we present new sound spectral analysis methods or prosthetic heart valve sounds. Phonocardiograms(PCG) of prosthetic heart valve were analyzed in order to derive frequency domain feature suitable or the classification of the valve state. The fast orthogonal search method and MUSIC (MUltiple SIgnal Classification) method are described or finding the significant frequencies in PCG. The fast orthogonal search method is effective with short data records and cope with noisy, missing and unequally-spaced data. MUSIC method's key to the performance is the division of the information in the autocorrelation matrix or the data matrix into two vector subspaces, one a signal subspace and the other a noise subspace.

• Proceedings of the KOSOMBE Conference
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• v.1997 no.05
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• pp.402-405
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• 1997

The analysis of heart sounds is a noninvasive diagnostic method useful to diagnose heart valve function. In this paper we compared the ability of spectral analysis method for prosthetic heart valve sounds. Phonocardiograms of prosthetic heart valve were analyzed in order to derive frequency domain feature suitable for the classification of the valve state. The FFT-based methods did not provide sufficient frequency resolution to completely characterize the spectrum of prosthetic heart valve sounds. A high resolution parametric methods were shown to give superior frequency resolution. In parametric methods, all methods provide a 1st & 2nd & 3rd frequency component. But Shank method provided a most dominant frequency peak.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.30 no.3
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• pp.149-157
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• 2011

In this paper, we propose a new cardiac disorder classification method using an support vector machine (SVM) to combine hidden Markov model (HMM) and murmur existence information. Using cepstral features and the HMM Viterbi algorithm, we segment input heart sound signals into HMM states for each cardiac disorder model and compute log-likelihood (score) for every state in the model. To exploit the temporal position characteristics of murmur signals, we divide the input signals into two subbands and compute murmur probability of every subband of each frame, and obtain the murmur score for each state by using the state segmentation information obtained from the Viterbi algorithm. With an input vector containing the HMM state scores and the murmur scores for all cardiac disorder models, SVM finally decides the cardiac disorder category. In cardiac disorder classification experimental results, the proposed method shows the relatively improvement rate of 20.4 % compared to the HMM-based classifier with the conventional cepstral features.