Classification of Heart Sounds Using Convolutional Neural Network

Heart sounds play an important role in the diagnosis of cardiac conditions. Due to the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), it is problematic and time-consuming for experts to discriminate different kinds of heart sounds. Thus, objective classification of heart sounds is essential. In this study, we combined a conventional feature engineering method with deep learning algorithms to automatically classify normal and abnormal heart sounds. First, 497 features were extracted from eight domains. Then, we fed these features into the designed convolutional neural network (CNN), in which the fully connected layers that are usually used before the classification layer were replaced with a global averag…