Pediatric heart sound segmentation using Hidden Markov Model

Recent advances in technology have enabled automatic cardiac auscultation using digital stethoscopes. This in turn creates the need for development of algorithms capable of automatic segmentation of heart sounds. Pediatric heart sound segmentation is a challenging task due to various confounding factors including the significant influence of respiration on children´s heart sounds. The current work investigates the application of homomorphic filtering and Hidden Markov Model for the purpose of segmenting pediatric heart sounds. The efficacy of the proposed method is evaluated on the publicly available Pascal Challenge dataset and its performance is compared with those of three other existing methods. The results show that our proposed method achieves an accuracy of 92.4%±1.1% and 93.5%±1.1% in identifying the first and second heart sound components, respectively, and is superior to three other existing methods in terms of accuracy or computational complexity.