A Data-Driven Feature Extraction Method for Enhanced Phonocardiogram Segmentation

Abstract

In this work, we present a method to extract features from heart sound signals in order to enhance segmentation performance. The approach is data-driven, since the way features are extracted from the recorded signals is adapted to the data itself. The proposed method is based on the extraction of delay vectors, which are modeled with Gaussian mixture model priors, and an information-theoretic dimensionality reduction step which aims to maximize discrimination between delay vectors in different segments of the heart sound signal. We test our approach with heart sounds from the publicly available PhysioNet dataset showing an average F1 score of 92.6% in detecting S1 and S2 sounds.