Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: Real Time Electronic Stethoscope for Heart Diseases Detection

Diseases of the cardiovascular system are one of the major causes of death worldwide. These diseases could be quickly detected by changes in the sound created by the action of the heart. This dynamic auscultations need extensive professional knowledge and emphasis on listening skills. There is also an unmet requirement for a compact cardiac condition early warning device. In this paper, we propose a prototype of a digital stethoscopic system for the diagnosis of cardiac abnormalities in real time using machine learning methods. This system consists of three subsystems that interact with each other (1) a portable digital subsystem of an electronic stethoscope, (2) a decision-making subsystem, and (3) a subsystem for displaying and visualizing the results in an understandable form. The electronic stethoscope captures the patient’s phonocardiographic sounds, filters and digitizes them, and then sends the resulting phonocardiographic sounds to the decision-making system. The decision-making system classifies sounds into normal and abnormal using machine learning techniques, and as a result identifies abnormal heart sounds. The display and visualization subsystem demonstrates the results obtained in an understandable way not only for medical staff, but also for patients and recommends further actions to patients. As a result of the study, we obtained an electronic stethoscope that can diagnose cardiac abnormalities with an accuracy of more than 90%. More accurately, the proposed stethoscope can identify normal heart sounds with 93.5% accuracy, abnormal heart sounds with 93.25% accuracy. Moreover, speed is the key benefit of the proposed stethoscope as 15 s is adequate for examination.