An Effiecient Modeling Technique for Heart Sounds and Murmurs

Cardiac auscultation is highly subjective and a cognitive process and the amount information that can be obtained by listening heart sounds largely depends on the expertise, experience and acuity of the ear of the physician. In general, the classification and interpretation of heart sounds and murmurs is based on a adjective 0-6/6 grade scale and described by using “faint”, “soft”, “loud”, “ high pitch”, “clear”, “thrill”, “tremor”, “musical” and others terms. These terms are not well-defined and suitable mathematical models are not available. Apart from that, the adjective scales vary among the doctors and difficult to derive a standard model for heart sound quality and correct clinical interpretation. In this research paper, we propose a novel framework based on psychoacoustic principles and derive psychoacoustic models for the heart sounds and murmurs. We discuss the theoretical foundations, psychoacoustic principles and derive the mathematical models for the psychoacoustic features such as loudness, sharpness, intensity, strength, roughness, tonality etc. for a set of heart sounds and murmurs. The proposed framework helps in deriving heart sound quality and also used for the comparison and correlation with normal and pathologic murmurs and enhances clinical decisions. .