4th International Conference on Electrical Engineering (ICEE 2015)

IGEE, Boumerdes, December 13th -15th, 2015

Classification of Normal and Abnormal Heart Sounds Using New

Mother Wavelet and Support Vector Machines

Mohamed Moustafa Azmy

Department of Biomedical Engineering, Medical Research Institute
Alexandria University
Alexandria, Egypt

drmazmi@gmail.com

AbstractAuscultation of heart sounds is very important to

identify cardiovascular diseases (CVD). In this paper new
approach for classification of heart sounds is introduced. This
approach depends on getting features from heart sounds using
statistical calculations of coefficients of new mother wavelet
transform. Then, these features are classified using support
vector machine (SVM). Number of features is 40 features.
Number of heart sounds used for training is 90 heart sounds.
Number of heart sounds used for tested data is 64 heart
sounds. The obtained accuracy percent is 92.29%. The
obtained specificity is 95.38%. The obtained sensitivity is 90%.
So, this new tool can help physicians to diagnose patients of
CVD easily.

heart sound samples were classified and recognized correctly

using probabilistic neural network as classifier.
M.Guermoui et al. [6]obtain features form heart sounds
using 4-level DWT and then used SVM as a classifier. He
obtained 90.345% of recognition ratio of heart sounds. The
proposed approach is based on that signals of heart sounds
i.e fig(1,2) are preprocessed with DWT with new mother
wavelet, then features of heart sounds is extracted by
statistical calculations. Finally, classification between
normal and abnormal heart sounds is conducted using
SVMs.

I. INTRODUCTION
From heart sound signal physiological and pathological
information in the various parts of the heart is obtained.
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are a group of disorders of
the heart and blood vessels. According to the statistics from
the world health organization (WHO), more people die
annually from CVDs than from any other cause [1]. An
estimated 17.3 million people died from CVDs in 2008,
representing 30% of all global deaths. Physicians use the
stethoscope as a device to listen to a patient's heart and make
a diagnosis accordingly. With the rapidly development of
signal processing, automatic recognition of heart sound
become possible. Wenjie Fu et al.[2] propose a identify heart
sound by using DTW and MFCC, average correct rate to
92.5%. XIALI ZHENG,et al. [3] improves segmentable rate
from 71.7% to 88.3%. They used discrete wavelet transform
(DWT) algorithm is applied in multi-resolution analysis
(MRA) thus to implement the envelogram segmentation.
The mel-scale frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs)
algorithm is further applied to carry HS feature extraction.
Cota Navin et al. [4] get the features of heart sounds using
DWT then use neural networks as classifier. They got
accuracy rate of 90.29%. G. Xingming [5] et al. get 94% of

2015 IEEE

Figure 1. Signal of Normal Heart Sounds

Figure 2. Signal of abnormal Heart Sounds

II. DISCRETE WAVELET TRANSFORM

In DWT, the wavelet coefficients are calculated at
discrete intervals of time and scale is used to form a set of
features that unambiguously characterize different types of
signals [6]. The result of DWT is equivalent to the passing
signal through a series of filters. Its dilation function can be
represented as a tree (known as multi-level filter bank)
consists of low and high pass filters with each layer
transforming the low pass filter into further lower and
higher frequency components as shown in Fig.3. The outputs
from a series of high pass filters give the detailed
coefficients (A7,D7,D6,D5,D4, D3, D2 and D1 in Fig. 3)
and the output from final low pass filter gives approximation
coefficient (D4 in Fig. 3). However, due to this
decomposition has halved the time resolution since only half
of each filters outputs characterise the signal, and each
filters outputs have half of the input band frequency so the
frequency resolution has been doubled. Notice that, the
mother wavelet is new mother wavelet which has a shape
near to the signal of heart sounds as shown in Fig. 4.

Figure 4. New mother wavelet

III. SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINE

Support Vector Machines (SVM's) are used as a learning
method for binary classification. The basic idea is to
construct hyperplane which separates between tested data
perfectly into its two classes. Support Vector Machines were
introduced by Vladimir Vapnik and colleagues. The earliest
mention was in (Vapnik, 1979), but the first main paper
seems to be (Vapnik, 1995). When designing a SVM, the
user is faced with the choice of which kernel to use, and for
a given kernel, how to set the parameter(s). All types of
kernels/parameters are studied to select the kernel achieving
the best performance. The best performance is achieved
when the kernel function is linear as shown in fig 5.

The equation of the new mother wavelet is:

(t) [u(t 2)e

(1 e 2 t )(1 u(t 2))] sin(2 t ) (1)

Figure 5. Classification of binary variables using linear SVM

IV. METHODS AND RESULTS

Figure 3. Coefficients of DWT

Database of heart sounds has been gathered from clinic

trials in hospitals [10]. There are two types of datasets,
datataset A and dataset B. Dataset A contains data from the
general public via the iS-tethoscope Pro iPhone app. Dataset
B, contains data from a clinic trial in hospitals using the
digital stethoscope DigiScope (Bentley et.al, 2011). These
audio les are of varying lengths, between 1 second and 30

seconds (some have been clipped to reduce excessive noise

and provide the salient fragment of the sound). Numbers of
heart sounds used for training procedure is 94. Numbers of
heart sounds used for testing procedure is 60. Number of
normal sounds is 61 sounds used for training and testing.
Numbers of abnormal sounds is 95 sounds in training and
testing. Classification for automatic recognition of heart
sounds using SVMs is introduced.
The signals of HSs are non-stationary signal [3, 10, 15].
So, the wavelet transform is applied (after preprocessing),
which is a time-frequency representation method that is very
suitable for analyzing non-stationary signals. Here, time
domain waveforms are represented to a frequency-time
domain while keeping both information of frequency and
time. Wavelet analysis used to measure similarity between
the original waveform x (t) and the mother wavelet, through
computation
of
wavelet
coefficients.
Wavelet
transformations are used to extract features of the heart
sounds. The idea of extracting features vector from each
single cardiac sound is to assess its variation degree over
time. In clear terms, for assigning a features vector for each
cardiac cycle, we first thoroughly analyse the whole cycle
using wavelets filter banks up to the 7th level having done
this, we get two components i.e. approximation and details
The secret behind the use of 7th level-based decomposition is
that is provides valuable information about S1-S2 signals
(see for instanceA4 in Fig. 3.) as well as murmurs and more
immune to noise, afterwards statistical calulation (i.e.
kurtosis, variance, skewness, mean and standard deviation)
are introduced for each coefficients of DWT of 7 details and
last approximation, then fed to the Classifier (SVMs) as
shown in Fig 6. The used kernel function of SVM is 1st
order. Then recognition, specificity, sensitivity are
calculated. Sensitivity is the number of abnormal subjects
classified correctly divided by the summation of the number
of abnormal subjects classified correctly and number of
abnormal subjects classified incorrectly. Specificity is the
number of normal subjects classified correctly divided by the
summation of number normal subjects classified correctly
and number of normal subjects classified incorrectly.
Recognition (accuracy) is the number of subjects correctly
classified divided by the total number of subjects. The
obtained accuracy rate is 92.29%. The obtained specificity
rate is 95.83%. The obtained sensitivity rate is 90%.

Figure 6. Steps of Recognition of heart sounds

V. CONCLUSION
In this paper, classification of heart sounds using new
mother wavelet is introduced. Two steps are used to extract
features from heart sounds. First, DWT of heart sounds is
extracted using new mother wavelet which looks like signal
of heart sounds, then statistical components are calculated to
get the features of heart sounds. When SVMs are used as
classifiers, the accuracy rate is 92.29%. So heart sounds are
recognized healthy or unhealthy. In the future work, features
are suggested to be extracted using principal component
analysis PCA using different classifiers such as linear
discriminant analysis LDA and Neural Networks.

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