Towards Domain Invariant Heart Sound Abnormality Detection using Learnable Filterbanks

Abstract

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 paper 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.

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References in corpus (2)

• Learning Front-end Filter-bank Parameters using Convolutional Neural Networks for Abnormal Heart Sound Detection
• An Ensemble of Transfer, Semi-supervised and Supervised Learning Methods for Pathological Heart Sound Classification

Cited by in corpus (4)

• CardioXNet: A Novel Lightweight Deep Learning Framework for Cardiovascular Disease Classification Using Heart Sound Recordings
• NRC-Net: Automated noise robust cardio net for detecting valvular cardiac diseases using optimum transformation method with heart sound signals
• HeartSiam: A Domain Invariant Model for Heart Sound Classification
• Heart Sound Classification Considering Additive Noise and Convolutional Distortion