Optimal wavelet denoising for phonocardiograms

Phonocardiograms (PCGs), recordings of heart sounds, have many advantages over traditional auscultation in that they may be replayed and analysed for spectral and frequency information. PCG is not a widely used diagnostic tool as it could be. One of the major problems with PCG is noise corruption. Many sources of noise may pollute a PCG including foetal breath sounds if the subject is pregnant, lung and breath sounds, environmental noise and noise from contact between the recording device and the skin. An electronic stethoscope is used to record heart sounds and the problem of extracting noise from the signal is addressed via the use of wavelets and averaging. Using the discrete wavelet transform, the signal is decomposed. Due to the efficient decomposition of heart signals, their wavelet coefficients tend to be much larger than those due to noise. Thus, coefficients below a certain level are regarded as noise and are thresholded out. The signal can then be reconstructed without significant loss of information in the signal content. The questions that this study attempts to answer are which wavelet families, levels of decomposition, and thresholding techniques best remove the noise in a PCG. The use of averaging in combination with wavelet denoising is also addressed. Possible applications of the Hilbert transform to heart sound analysis are discussed.