A prototype of heart sound database

The heart sound database (HSDB) is a special database, which is used for storing special heart sound cases needed by clinical work, research and teaching of cardiac auscultation. This database is multimedia-based. The heart sounds were transduced using a phonocardiographic sensor and amplified with a preprocessing circuit called the heart sound card. The amplified signals were collected, digitized and stored on hard disk on a multimedia PC. The data was sampled at 8000 Hz and is stored as 8 second segments, with 8 bit quantification. The heart sound signals were stored in the form of waveform files (.WAV) firstly, then the useful ones were stored in HSDB. For those heart sound samples stored on tape, we used a cassette recorder to feed them into the multimedia PC. In addition, we also collected some other heart sound samples through the Internet and those on floppy disk. Forty typical heart sound samples and relevant information were selected and stored in HSDB as a prototype. This kind of database can be employed in many fields such as clinical work, research and teaching. HSDB will be of benefit for animal experiments on Chinese herbs which change the contraction of the heart, such as cardio-glucosides and non-cardio-glucosides