Abstract: Diagnosis of congenital cardiac defects is challenging, with some being diagnosed during pregnancy while others are diagnosed after birth or later on during childhood. Prompt diagnosis allows early intervention and best prognosis. Contemporary diagnosis relies upon the history, clinical examination, pulse oximetery, chest X-ray, electrocardiogram (ECG), echocardiography (ECHO), computed tomography (CT) and cardiac catheterization. These diagnostic modalities reliable upon recording electrical activity or sound waves or upon radiation. Yet, congenital heart diseases are still liable to misdiagnosis because of level of operator expertise and other multiple factors. In an attempt to minimize effect of operator expertise this paper built a classification model for heart murmur recognition using Hidden Markov Model (HMM). This paper used Mel Frequency Cepestral coefficient (MFCC) as a feature and 13 MFCC coefficients. The machine learning model built by studying 1069 different heart sounds covering normal heart sounds, ventricular septal defect (VSD), mitral regurgitation (MR), aortic stenosis (AS), aortic regurgitation (AR), patent ductus arteriosus (PDA), pulmonary regurgitation (PR), and pulmonary stenosis (PS). MFCC feature used to extract feature matrix for each type of heart sounds after separation according to amplitude threshold. The frequency of normal heart sound (range= 1Hz to 139Hz) was specific without overlap with any of the studied defects (ranged= 156-556Hz). The frequency ranges for each of these defects was typical without overlap according to examined heart area (aortic, pulmonary, tricuspid and mitral area). The overall correct classification rate (CCR) using this model was 96% and sensitivity 98%. This model has great potential for prompt screening and specific defect detection. Effect of cardiac contractility, cardiomegaly or cardiac electrical activity on this novel detection system needs to be verified in future works.

Magd Ahmed Kotb, Hesham Nabih Elmahdy, Fatma El Zahraa Mostafa, Mona El Falaki, Christine William Shaker, Mohamed Ahmed Refaey and Khaled W Y Rjoob, “Improving the Recognition of Heart Murmur” International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications(IJACSA), 7(7), 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2016.070740

@article{Kotb2016,
title = {Improving the Recognition of Heart Murmur},
journal = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
doi = {10.14569/IJACSA.2016.070740},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2016.070740},
year = {2016},
publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
volume = {7},
number = {7},
author = {Magd Ahmed Kotb and Hesham Nabih Elmahdy and Fatma El Zahraa Mostafa and Mona El Falaki and Christine William Shaker and Mohamed Ahmed Refaey and Khaled W Y Rjoob}
}