Acoustic cardiac signals analysis: a Kalman filter–based approach

• Main Authors: Salleh SH, Hussain HS, Swee TT, Ting CM, Noor AM, Pipatsart S, Ali J, Yupapin PP
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dove Medical Press 2012-06-01
• Series: International Journal of Nanomedicine
• Online Access: http://www.dovepress.com/acoustic-cardiac-signals-analysis-a-kalman-filterndashbased-approach-a10077

Sheik Hussain Salleh,1 Hadrina Sheik Hussain,2 Tan Tian Swee,2 Chee-Ming Ting,2 Alias Mohd Noor,2 Surasak Pipatsart,3 Jalil Ali,4 Preecha P Yupapin31Department of Biomedical Instrumentation and Signal Processing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Skudai, Malaysia; 2Centre for Biomedical Engineering Transportation Research Alliance, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru, Malaysia; 3Nanoscale Science and Engineering Research Alliance, King Mongkut's Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, Bangkok, Thailand; 4Institute of Advanced Photonics Science, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Johor Bahru, MalaysiaAbstract: Auscultation of the heart is accompanied by both electrical activity and sound. Heart auscultation provides clues to diagnose many cardiac abnormalities. Unfortunately, detection of relevant symptoms and diagnosis based on heart sound through a stethoscope is difficult. The reason GPs find this difficult is that the heart sounds are of short duration and separated from one another by less than 30 ms. In addition, the cost of false positives constitutes wasted time and emotional anxiety for both patient and GP. Many heart diseases cause changes in heart sound, waveform, and additional murmurs before other signs and symptoms appear. Heart-sound auscultation is the primary test conducted by GPs. These sounds are generated primarily by turbulent flow of blood in the heart. Analysis of heart sounds requires a quiet environment with minimum ambient noise. In order to address such issues, the technique of denoising and estimating the biomedical heart signal is proposed in this investigation. Normally, the performance of the filter naturally depends on prior information related to the statistical properties of the signal and the background noise. This paper proposes Kalman filtering for denoising statistical heart sound. The cycles of heart sounds are certain to follow first-order Gauss–Markov process. These cycles are observed with additional noise for the given measurement. The model is formulated into state-space form to enable use of a Kalman filter to estimate the clean cycles of heart sounds. The estimates obtained by Kalman filtering are optimal in mean squared sense.Keywords: heart sound, murmurs, ECG, Kalman filters, acoustic cardiac signals