BUET Multi-disease Heart Sound Dataset: A Comprehensive Auscultation Dataset for Developing Computer-Aided Diagnostic Systems

Cardiac auscultation, an integral tool in diagnosing cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), often relies on the subjective interpretation of clinicians, presenting a limitation in consistency and accuracy. Addressing this, we introduce the BUET Multi-disease Heart Sound (BMD-HS) dataset - a comprehensive and meticulously curated collection of heart sound recordings. This dataset, encompassing 864 recordings across five distinct classes of common heart sounds, represents a broad spectrum of valvular heart diseases, with a focus on diagnostically challenging cases. The standout feature of the BMD-HS dataset is its innovative multi-label annotation system, which captures a diverse range of diseases and unique disease states. This system significantly enhances the dataset's utility for developing advanced machine learning models in automated heart sound classification and diagnosis. By bridging the gap between traditional auscultation practices and contemporary data-driven diagnostic methods, the BMD-HS dataset is poised to revolutionize CVD diagnosis and management, providing an invaluable resource for the advancement of cardiac health research. The dataset is publicly available at this link: https://github.com/mHealthBuet/BMD-HS-Dataset.

Heart Sound Classification Considering Additive Noise and Convolutional Distortion

Cardiac auscultation is an essential point-of-care method used for the early diagnosis of heart diseases. Automatic analysis of heart sounds for abnormality detection is faced with the challenges of additive noise and sensor-dependent degradation. This paper aims to develop methods to address the cardiac abnormality detection problem when both types of distortions are present in the cardiac auscultation sound. We first mathematically analyze the effect of additive and convolutional noise on short-term filterbank-based features and a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) layer. Based on the analysis, we propose a combination of linear and logarithmic spectrogram-image features. These 2D features are provided as input to a residual CNN network (ResNet) for heart sound abnormality detection. Experimental validation is performed on an open-access heart sound abnormality detection dataset involving noisy recordings obtained from multiple stethoscope sensors. The proposed method achieves significantly improved results compared to the conventional approaches, with an area under the ROC (receiver operating characteristics) curve (AUC) of 91.36%, F-1 score of 84.09%, and Macc (mean of sensitivity and specificity) of 85.08%. We also show that the proposed method shows the best mean accuracy across different source domains including stethoscope and noise variability, demonstrating its effectiveness in different recording conditions. The proposed combination of linear and logarithmic features along with the ResNet classifier effectively minimizes the impact of background noise and sensor variability for classifying phonocardiogram (PCG) signals. The proposed method paves the way towards developing computer-aided cardiac auscultation systems in noisy environments using low-cost stethoscopes.