Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine
Volume 2013 (2013), Article ID 376152, 10 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2013/376152
Research Article

Classification of Prolapsed Mitral Valve versus Healthy Heart from Phonocardiograms by Multifractal Analysis

1Research and Development Department, Innovation Center of the School of Electrical Engineering in Belgrade, Bulevar Kralja Aleksandra 73, 11120 Belgrade, Serbia
2Department of Telecommunications and Information Technology, School of Electrical Engineering, University of Belgrade, Bulevar Kralja Aleksandra 73, 11120 Belgrade, Serbia
3Department of Telecommunications, ICT College of Vocational Studies, Zdravka Čelara 16, 11000 Belgrade, Serbia

Received 27 December 2012; Revised 11 April 2013; Accepted 25 April 2013

Academic Editor: Reinoud Maex

Copyright © 2013 Ana Gavrovska et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Phonocardiography has shown a great potential for developing low-cost computer-aided diagnosis systems for cardiovascular monitoring. So far, most of the work reported regarding cardiosignal analysis using multifractals is oriented towards heartbeat dynamics. This paper represents a step towards automatic detection of one of the most common pathological syndromes, so-called mitral valve prolapse (MVP), using phonocardiograms and multifractal analysis. Subtle features characteristic for MVP in phonocardiograms may be difficult to detect. The approach for revealing such features should be locally based rather than globally based. Nevertheless, if their appearances are specific and frequent, they can affect a multifractal spectrum. This has been the case in our experiment with the click syndrome. Totally, 117 pediatric phonocardiographic recordings (PCGs), 8 seconds long each, obtained from 117 patients were used for PMV automatic detection. We propose a two-step algorithm to distinguish PCGs that belong to children with healthy hearts and children with prolapsed mitral valves (PMVs). Obtained results show high accuracy of the method. We achieved 96.91% accuracy on the dataset (97 recordings). Additionally, 90% accuracy is achieved for the evaluation dataset (20 recordings). Content of the datasets is confirmed by the echocardiographic screening.