A dynamic method to estimate the time split between the A2 and P2 components of the S2 heart sound.

The time interval between the aortic (A2) and the pulmonary (P2) components of the second heart sound (S2) is an indicator of pulmonary arterial pressure. However, knowledge of the A2 and P2 components of the S2 sound is difficult to obtain due to their temporal overlap and significant spectral similarity. In this work, we aim to extract the A2 and P2 components from the phonocardiogram to estimate the time interval between them. We attain our objective by first isolating the S2 sound from the phonocardiogram by utilizing the mode complexity of the heart. Then, we assume the statistical independence of the A2 and P2 components and extract them from the S2 sound by the application of blind source separation techniques. Once separated, the time interval between the A2 and P2 components is estimated with a time-centroid-based method. Experimental results using simulated data show excellent performance of the proposed algorithm to extract the A2 and the P2 components from the S2 sound and to estimate the time interval between them. Results obtained from real data are also encouraging and show promise for utilizing the proposed method in a clinical setting to non-invasively tract pulmonary hypertension.