Proposal of BSS method to separate the respiratory sound and the heart sound

Conventionally, there is a method to use auscultation when medical doctors diagnose a disease from heartbeats with heart noise. However, the respiratory sound and the heart sound are mixed. Further, it is difficult for the desired heart sound to be heard. For solving this problem, we propose a method to separate respiratory sound and heart sound based on blind source separation (BSS). In BSS method, we use a non-linear function corresponding to the probability distribution of source signals in order to separate. A distribution of the respiratory sound is a high-order sub-Gaussian distribution close to uniform distribution, a distribution of the heart sound is a super Gaussian distribution. In the conventional method, there is no non-linear function corresponding to both distribution. Therefore, in this paper, in order to separate the respiratory sound and the heart sound, we propose new non-linear function accurately separated from super Gaussian distribution through sub-Gaussian distribution to uniform distribution. Then, we build the BSS method based on the proposed non-linear function. We evaluate the proposed method by computer simulation.