Online estimation of lower and upper bounds for heart sound boundaries in chest sound using Convex-hull algorithm

Heart sound localization in chest sound is an essential part for many heart sound cancellation algorithms. The main difficulty for heart sound localization methods is the precise determination of the onset and offset boundaries of the heart sound segment. This paper presents a novel method to estimate lower and upper bounds for the onset and offset of the heart sound segment, which can be used as anchor points for more precise estimation. For this purpose, first chest sound is divided into frames and then entropy and smoothed entropy features of these frames are extracted, and used in the Convex-hull algorithm to estimate the upper and lower bounds for heart sound boundaries. The Convex-hull algorithm constructs a special type of envelope function for entropy features and if the maximal difference between the envelope function and the entropy is larger than a certain threshold, this point is considered as a heart sound bound. The results of the proposed method are compared with a baseline method which is a modified version of a well-known heart sound localization method. The results show that the proposed method outperforms the baseline method in terms of accuracy and detection error rate. Also, the experimental results show that smoothing entropy features significantly improves the performance of both baseline and proposed methods. © 2012 IEEE.