Simplicity based gating of heart sounds

Segmentation of the phonocardiogram (PCG) into its major sound components is the first step in automated diagnosis of cardiac abnormalities. Almost all the existing PCG segmentation algorithms are based upon amplitude or frequency characteristics, of the heart sounds, that vary from one cardiac cycle to the other and across different patients. The objective of this work is to provide an efficient PCG segmentation technique, under difficult recording situations, by utilizing the underlying complexity of the dynamical system (heart) giving rise to the heart sound. Complexity based segmentation is invariant to amplitude and frequency variations of the heart sound and yields better time gates for pathological heart sounds.