Chronic Heart Failure Detection from Heart Sounds Using a Stack of Machine-Learning Classifiers

Chronic heart failure represents a global pandemic, currently affecting over 26 million of patients worldwide. It is a major contributor in the death rate of patients with cardiovascular diseases and results in more than 1 million hospitalizations annually in Europe and North America. Methods for chronic heart failure detection can be utilized to act preventive, improve early diagnosis and avoid hospitalizations or even life-threatening situations, thus highly enhance the quality of patient’s life. In this paper, we present a machine-learning method for chronic heart failure detection from heart sounds. The method consists of: filtering, segmentation, feature extraction and machine learning. The method was tested with a leave-one-subject-out evaluation technique on data from 122 subjects, gathered in the study. The method achieved 96% accuracy, outperforming a majority classifier for 15 percentage points. More specifically, it detects (recalls) 87% of the chronic heart failure subjects with a precision of 87%. The study confirmed that advanced machine learning applied on real-life sounds recorded with an unobtrusive digital stethoscope can be used for chronic heart failure detection.