Towards Domain Invariant Heart Sound Abnormality Detection Using Learnable Filterbanks.

OBJECTIVE: Cardiac auscultation is the most practiced non-invasive and cost-effective procedure for the early diagnosis of heart diseases. While machine learning based systems can aid in automatically screening patients, the robustness of these systems is affected by numerous factors including the stethoscope/sensor, environment, and data collection protocol. This article studies the adverse effect of domain variability on heart sound abnormality detection and develops strategies to address this problem. METHODS: We propose a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) layer, consisting of time-convolutional (tConv) units, that emulate Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filters. The filter coefficients can be updated via backpropagation and be stacked in the front-end of the network as a learnable filterbank. RESULTS: On publicly available multi-domain datasets, the proposed method surpasses the top-scoring systems found in the literature for heart sound abnormality detection (a binary classification task). We utilized sensitivity, specificity, F-1 score and Macc (average of sensitivity and specificity) as performance metrics. Our systems achieved relative improvements of up to 11.84% in terms of MAcc, compared to state-of-the-art methods. CONCLUSION: The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed learnable filterbank CNN architecture in achieving robustness towards sensor/domain variability in PCG signals. SIGNIFICANCE: The proposed methods pave the way for deploying automated cardiac screening systems in diversified and underserved communities.

Learning Front-end Filter-bank Parameters using Convolutional Neural Networks for Abnormal Heart Sound Detection.

Automatic heart sound abnormality detection can play a vital role in the early diagnosis of heart diseases, particularly in low-resource settings. The state-of-the-art algorithms for this task utilize a set of Finite Impulse Response (FIR) band-pass filters as a front-end followed by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model. In this work, we propound a novel CNN architecture that integrates the front-end band-pass filters within the network using time-convolution (tConv) layers, which enables the FIR filter-bank parameters to become learnable. Different initialization strategies for the learnable filters, including random parameters and a set of predefined FIR filter-bank coefficients, are examined. Using the proposed tConv layers, we add constraints to the learnable FIR filters to ensure linear and zero phase responses. Experimental evaluations are performed on a balanced 4-fold cross-validation task prepared using the PhysioNet/CinC 2016 dataset. Results demonstrate that the proposed models yield superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art system, while the linear phase FIR filter-bank method provides an absolute improvement of 9.54% over the baseline in terms of an overall accuracy metric.