The ability to use an acoustic stethoscope to detect lung and/or heart sounds, and then to then communicate one's interpretation of those sounds is an essential skill for many medical professionals. Interpretation of lung and heart sounds, in the context of history and other examination findings, often aids the differential diagnosis. Bedside assessment of changing auscultation findings may als...

UNDERGRADUATE TEACHING of cardiovascular physiology often involves lectures on heart sounds. To complement these lectures, online resources are commonly used. The audio files of heart sounds are available as free downloads on the internet from websites of stethoscope manufacturers such as Thinklabs (http://www.thinklabsmedical.com/sound-library.html) and Littmann (http://solutions.3mindia.co.in...

Heart auscultation (the interpretation by a physician of heart sounds) is a fundamental component in cardiac diagnosis. It is, however, a difficult skill to acquire. In this work, we present a study for a system intended to aid in heart sound analysis. Based on a wavelet decomposition of the sounds and a neural network-based classifier, heart sounds are associated with likely underlying patholo...

BACKGROUND Cardiac auscultation is a cost-effective, noninvasive screening tool that can provide information about cardiovascular hemodynamics and disease. However, with advances in imaging and laboratory tests, the importance of cardiac auscultation is less appreciated in clinical practice. The widespread use of smartphones provides opportunities for nonmedical expert users to perform self-exa...

In this paper we describe our methodology and results for the Classifying Heart Sounds PASCAL Challenge. We present our algoritm and results for segmentation and classification of S1 and S2 heart sounds.