Combining Spectral Analysis with Artificial Intelligence in Heart Sound Study

The auscultation technique has been widely used in medicine as a screening examination for ages. Nowadays, advanced electronics and effective computational methods aim to support the healthcare sector by providing dedicated solutions which help physicians and support diagnostic process. In this paper, we propose a machine learning approach for the analysis of heart sounds. We used the spectral analysis of acoustic signal to calculate feature vectors and tested a set of machine learning approaches to provide the most effective detection of cardiac disorders. Finally, we achieved 91% of sensitivity and 99% of positive predictivity for a designed algorithm based on convolutional neural network.