Computer-assisted auscultation: Patent ductus arteriosus detection based on auditory time-frequency analysis

This study presents a computer-assisted auscultation approach for patent ductus arteriosus (PDA) detection. PDA is a frequent congenital heart disease in neonates. The early detection of the PDA murmur from a neonate's heart sound is important to avoid the development of severe respiratory diseases in newborns. Computer-assisted auscultation has the potential to become a heart disease screening tool because it can improve the sensitivity and specificity of heart murmur detection. This study proposes an auditory time-frequency representation method (auditory spectrogram) to demonstrate the dynamic and non-stationary characteristics of heart murmurs. The auditory spectrogram is obtained using the proposed cochlear wavelet transform, which mimics the auditory response of the cochlea in the human auditory system. The auditory spectrogram can represent the heart sounds in the time-frequency domain to assist cardiac auscultation. Furthermore, the spectrum flux and spectrum centroid are used to characterize the configuration of the auditory spectrogram. The phonocardiogram data of 18 patients, including normal heart sounds, innocent murmurs, and PDA murmurs, are used in the blind test for algorithm effectiveness assessment. The results demonstrate that the proposed computer-assisted auscultation method can achieve a high sensitivity of 100 % and a specificity of 91.67 % for PDA detection. The developed method is robust, cost-effective, and convenient, making it effective for the enhancement of the accuracy of PDA detection.