Multi-Channel Audio-Based Estimation of the Pre-Ejection Period

Authors

Abstract

Systolic time intervals (STI) have significant diagnostic and prognostic value to assess the global cardiac function. Presently, STIs are regarded as a promising tool for long-term follow-up of patients with chronic cardio-vascular diseases. Heart sound has proven to be a valuable approach for STI estimation, in particular for the Pre-Ejection Period (PEP). However, since the optimal auscultation site varies from individual to individual, as well as with the position of the body, its application in single-channel and fixed auscultation site setups poses practical difficulties. Hence, we extend our previous work on PEP estimation to a multi-channel sound acquisition setup, where signal redundancy is exploited. A channel selection method is proposed and the best channel is selected for PEP estimation. As a preliminary study, the devised algorithms were evaluated with respect to echocardiography reference on a set of 236 heartbeats collected from 8 healthy subjects in two sound auscultation sites. The channel selection approach led to 8.4% estimation error decrease, in comparison to a single-channel approach. Current results support our assumption that a multi-channel audio-based strategy can be applied to assess STI in personal health application scenarios.

Subject

Clinical Informatics

Related Project

HeartSafe – Assessing Heart Function for Unsupervised Homecare Applications through Multi-Channel Auscultation

Conference

37th Int. Conf. of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society – EMBC’2015, August 2015

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