Acoustic Features for the Identification of Coronary Artery Disease.

GOAL

Earlier studies have documented that coronary artery disease (CAD) produces weak murmurs, which might be detected through analysis of heart sounds. An electronic stethoscope with a digital signal processing unit could be a low cost and easily applied method for diagnosis of CAD. The current study is a search for heart sound features which might identify CAD.

METHODS

Nine different types of features from five overlapping frequency bands were obtained and analyzed using 435 recordings from 133 subjects.

RESULTS

New features describing an increase in low-frequency power in CAD patients were identified. The features of the different types were relatively strongly correlated. Using a quadratic discriminant function, multiple features were combined into a CAD-score. The area under the receiving operating characteristic for the CAD score was 0.73 (95% CI: 0.69-0.78).

CONCLUSION

The result confirms that there is a potential in heart sounds for the diagnosis of CAD, but that further improvements are necessary to gain clinical relevance.