Region-based phonocardiogram event segmentation in spectrogram image

Abstract

Assisting physicians in the auscultation of the patients by providing cost effective, automatic and accurate signal processing module for the heart event detection and recognition is of importance. We suggest that the segmentation of time-frequency representation image of one-dimensional phonocardiogram signals (PCGs) could be effective for observing possible abnormal heart events. The fact that frequency bands of cardiac events overlap and that different heart dysfunctions can occur simultaneously make image event segmentation a difficult task. Ambient noise and artifact burden make the segmentation problem even more difficult. A method of “splitting and merging” algorithm involving region-growing based on seeds is presented. We demonstrate that this method contributes to design of patterns required for cardiac event recognition and identification on several examples presented here.