Shape-based retrieval of heart sounds for disease similarity detection

Abstract

Retrieval of similar heart sounds from a sound database has applications in physician training, diagnostic screening, and decision support. In this paper, we exploit a visual rendering of heart sounds and model the morphological variations of audio envelopes through a constrained non-rigid translation transform. Similar heart sounds are then retrieved by recovering the corresponding alignment transform using a variant of shape-based dynamic time warping. Results of similar heart sound retrieval are demonstrated for various diseases on a large database of heart sounds. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.