Correlation analysis of dynamic spectral phonocardiogram with electrocardiogram as a means of assessing the heart ailment

This paper reports the development of a PC-based system performing spectral estimation and correlation analysis of phonocardiogram and electrocardiogram as to establish a basis for making cardiovascular diagnosis. Keeping in view of simplicity in hardware requirement, a PC is converted into a real-time PC by adding an I/O card to the printer port. The heart sound signal picked up from a high sensitive microphone and the ECG signal taken from the electrodes attached to the patient are digitized, read in to the PC and saved as data files. From these data files, power spectral densities are estimated accordingly. Then, the PSD of the patient´s heart sound is cross correlated with the PSD of the stored normal heart sound and also with the PSD of the ECG. The power spectral densities and the cross correlation results are presented simultaneously as 3-D window display in the PC screen. The simultaneous display of all these information would help in simplifying the diagnosis process