Positioning and Averaging of Phonocardiographic Signals Based on the Matching Pursuit Method

Heart sounds are highly valuable to cardiovascular diseases in clinical diagnoses. So the analysis of phonocardiogram (PCG) is helpful in the field. It is significant to position heart sounds in time domain accurately and automatically. A time-frequency transformation based on matching pursuit method (MPM) is developed for the PCG. The method was applied to 60 cardiac cycles. It positioned the first (SI) and the second (S2) heart sounds automatically. Also their averages were calculated. The results show that MPM gives a correct detection rate up to 93.3%. The processing is real-time. The method can eliminate electrocardiogram (ECG) as time-reference signal and reduce hardware overheads. It is independent of subjective human judgment and robust to artifacts, background noise and other interferences