Developing Bluetooth phonocardiogram for detecting heart murmurs using hybrid MFCC and LSTM

Abstract

Cardiovascular disease is a leading global cause of mortality. Most stethoscopes still necessitate the use of tubing, which entails direct physical contact between the healthcare provider and patient. The stethoscope can serve as a means of transmission if it is utilized on individuals who have been diagnosed with airborne and droplet-borne infectious illnesses. A prototype was created to capture heart sounds using a Phonocardiography (PCG) device over website-based Bluetooth connectivity. This approach offers the benefits of being cost-effective, facilitating computer-aided diagnostics, and being wearable. In addition, the primary significance of this study resides in the identification of heart sound irregularities caused by cardio dynamic abnormalities of the heart valves, known as murmurs. The heart sound categorization process utilizes a machine learning model that involves extracting 25 Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) as features. The model employs a hybrid approach combining convolutional neural network and long short-term memory (CNN-LSTM) techniques. The research findings indicate that the suggested model achieves an average accuracy rate of 95.9% over five distinct categories, i.e., normal, atrial stenosis, mitral regurgitation, mitral stenosis, and mitral valves prolapse. Further study can be conducted on hardware development by incorporating an infrared sensor at the fingertip of the stethoscope.