Phonocardiogram Classification Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks with Majority Vote Strategy

Abstract

Most current automated phonocardiogram (PCG) classification methods are relied on PCG segmentation. It is universal to make use of the segmented PCG signals and then extract efficiency features for computer-aided auscultation or heart sound classification. However, the accurate segmentation of the fundamental heart sounds depends greatly on the quality of the heart sound signals. In addition these methods that heavily relied on segmentation algorithm considerably increase the computational burden. To solve above two issues, we have developed a novel approach to classify normal and abnormal cardiac diseases with un-segmented PCG signals. A deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) method is proposed for recognizing normal and abnormal cardiac diseases. In the proposed method, one-dimensional heart sound signals are first converted into twodimensional feature maps which have three channels and each of them represents Mel-frequency spectral coefficients (MFSC) features including static, delta and delta–delta. These artificial images are then fed to the proposed DCNNs to train and evaluate normal and abnormal heart sound signals. We combined the method of majority vote strategy to finally obtain the category of PCG signals. Sensitivity (Se), Specificity (Sp) and Mean accuracy (MAcc) are used as the evaluation metrics. Results: Experiments demonstrated that our approach achieved a significant improvement, with the high Se, Sp, and MAcc of 92.73%, 96.90% and 94.81% respectively. The proposed method improves the MAcc by 5.63% compared with the best result in the CinC Challenge 2016. In addition, it has better robustness performance when applying for the long heart sounds. The proposed DCNNs-based method can achieve the best accuracy performance on recognizing normal and abnormal heart sounds without the preprocessing of segmental algorithm. It significantly improves the classification performance compared with the current state-of-art algorithm.