Benchmarking Time-Frequency Representations of Phonocardiogram Signals for Classification of Valvular Heart Diseases Using Deep Features and Machine Learning

Edwin M. Chambi, Jefry Cuela, Milagros Zegarra, Erasmo Sulla, Jorge Rendulich

Heart sounds and murmur provide crucial diagnosis information for valvular heart diseases (VHD). A phonocardiogram (PCG) combined with modern digital processing techniques provides a complementary tool for clinicians. This article proposes a benchmark different time–frequency representations, which are spectograms, mel-spectograms and cochleagrams for obtaining images, in addition to the use of two interpolation techniques to improve the quality of the images, which are bicubic and Lanczos. Deep features are extracted from a pretrained model called VGG16, and for feature reduction, the Boruta algorithm is applied. To evaluate the models and obtain more precise results, nested cross-validation is used. The best results achieved in this study were for the cochleagram with 99.2% accuracy and mel-spectogram representation with the bicubic interpolation technique, which reached 99.4% accuracy, both having a support vector machine (SVM) as a classifier algorithm. Overall, this study highlights the potential of time–frequency representations of PCG signals combined with modern digital processing techniques and machine learning algorithms for accurate diagnosis of VHD.