A Subject-Driven Unsupervised Hidden Semi-Markov Model and Gaussian Mixture Model for Heart Sound Segmentation

• Published in: IEEE journal of selected topics in signal processing Vol. 13; no. 2; pp. 323 - 331
• Main Authors: Oliveira, Jorge, Renna, Francesco, Coimbra, Miguel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.05.2019; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Acoustics; Algorithms; Analytical models; Emission; emission modeling and optimization; Gaussian distribution; Gaussian mixture model; Gaussian mixture models; Heart; Hidden Markov models; Markov chains; Markov models; phonocardiogram; Phonocardiography; Probabilistic models; Probability distribution; Segmentation; Signal processing; Signal processing algorithms
• ISSN: 1932-4553; 1941-0484
• DOI: 10.1109/JSTSP.2019.2908723

The analysis of heart sounds is a challenging task, due to the quick temporal onset between successive events and the fact that an important fraction of the information carried by phonocardiogram (PCG) signals lies in the inaudible part of the human spectrum. For these reasons, computer-aided analysis of the PCG can dramatically improve the quantity of information recovered from such signals. In this paper, a hidden semi-Markov model (HSMM) is used to automatically segment PCG signals. In the proposed models, the emission probability distributions are approximated via Gaussian mixture model (GMM) priors. The choice of GMM emission probability distributions allow to apply re-estimation routines to automatically adjust the HSMM emission probability distributions to each subject. Building on the proposed method for fine tuning emission distributions, a novel subject-driven unsupervised heart sound segmentation algorithm is proposed and validated over the publicly available PhysioNet dataset. Perhaps surprisingly, the proposed unsupervised method achieved results in line with state-of-the-art supervised approaches, when applied to long heart sounds.