Can Multi-channel Heart Sounds Analysis improve Murmur Detection?

Cardiac auscultation is still the most cost-effective screening procedure for cardiovascular diseases. The development of computer assisted methods can empower a large variety of health professionals and thus enable mass cardiac health low-cost screening. The procedure for correct cardiac auscultation includes listening to the heart sounds of the four main auscultation spots. Until recently, attempts to develop automatic heart sound analysis methods that explore the multi-channel richness of a real auscultation, were very difficult due to the lack of adequate public datasets. In this work, we use the CirCor Dataset which is characterized by the existence of more than one heart sound per patient (each patient has heart sounds collected at different auscultation spots). Using this dataset, we evaluate and quantify the comparative impact of using a single or a multi-channel approach. A single channel approach uses the sound from a single auscultation spot, whereas a multi-channel approach uses four auscultation spots in an asynchronous way. From the different classifiers tested, models that use four auscultation spots achieved a higher overall performance than those that search for abnormalities in a single heart sound spot. Our best result is a multi-channel SVM that analyzes four auscultation spots, with an overall performance of 87,4%. This opens the path to future research using a multi-channel approach.