Acquisition and time-frequency analysis of the phonocardiogram signal

Abstract

In this paper, we are presenting novel software allowing acquisition and analysis of the Phonocardiogram (PCG) signal. A microphone assembled with a stethoscope head and personal computer, which monitors the acquisition process, makes up the required equipment. The proposed software allows wide sampling frequencies range recording from 500 Hz to 22 KHz with 16 bits resolution, and time-frequency analysis using Reassigned-Spectrogram approach. The reassignment of the time-frequency plan overcomes the resolution limitation of such a classical method. The developed software seems to be a reliable tool for the evaluation of the severity of the pathological cases with both temporal and spectral information.