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.

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.