An adaptive singular spectrum analysis approach to murmur detection from heart sounds

Murmur is the result of various heart abnormalities. A new robust approach for separation of murmur from heart sound has been suggested in this article. Singular spectrum analysis (SSA) has been adapted to the changes in the statistical properties of the data and effectively used for detection of murmur from single-channel heart sound (HS) signals. Incorporating a cleverly selected a priori within the SSA reconstruction process, results in an accurate separation of normal HS from the murmur segment. Another contribution of this work is selection of the correct subspace of the desired signal component automatically. In addition, the subspace size can be identified iteratively. A number of HS signals with murmur have been processed using the proposed adaptive SSA (ASSA) technique and the results have been quantified both objectively and subjectively.