Cardiovascular diseases have become one of the most prevalent threats to human health throughout the world. As a noninvasive assistant diagnostic tool, the heart sound detection techniques play an important role in the prediction of cardiovascular diseases. In this paper, the latest development of the computer‐aided heart sound detection techniques over the last five years has been reviewed. There are mainly the following aspects: the theories of heart sounds and the relationship between heart sounds and cardiovascular diseases; the key technologies used in the processing and analysis of heart sound signals, including denoising, segmentation, feature extraction and classification; with emphasis, the applications of deep learning algorithm in heart sound processing. In the end, some areas for future research in computer‐aided heart sound detection techniques are explored, hoping to provide reference to the prediction of cardiovascular diseases.

Heart sounds are an important basis for evaluating heart disease. In recent years, auxiliary diagnosis technology of cardiovascular disease based on the detection of heart sound signals has become a research hotspot. A lightweight automatic heart sound classification method is presented in this study. It only needs to perform simple preprocessing on the heart sound data, and a neural network model is constructed to automatically extract the time–frequency features of heart sound data: where the convolution module extracts the frequency-domain characteristics, the loop module extracts the time-domain characteristics, and the features are then fused in series and parallel. Finally, the classification and recognition of heart sounds are realized based on the fusion features. At the same time, methods, such as group convolution, global average pooling, and gated loop mechanisms, are used to reduce the parameters and training time of the neural network. The experimental data from the PhysioNet database are used for testing. The recognition accuracy of the series feature fusion heart sound classification model is 95.00%, and the model size is 0.6 MB. In addition, the parallel feature fusion heart sound classification model is 95.50%, and the model size is 1.36 MB. Therefore, the lightweight heart sound classification model designed in this study contains fewer parameters and higher recognition accuracy. This makes it suitable for deployment in embedded devices. It also has important research significance for the development of portable heart sound detection equipment.

Exploration Geophysics is published by CSIRO PUBLISHING on behalf of the Australian Society of Exploration Geophysicists. Papers published report the results of significant case histories and relevant original research in geophysics, with emphasis on the Australian and similar environments.

The photoplethysmography (PPG) is inevitably corrupted by many kinds of noise no matter whether its acquisition mode is transmittance or reflectance. To enhance the quality of PPG signals, many studies have made great progress in PPG denoising by adding extra sensors and developing complex algorithms. Considering the reasonable cost, compact size, and real-time and easy implementation, this study proposed a simple real-time denoising method based on double median filters which can be integrated in microcontroller of commercial or portable pulse oximeters without adding extra hardware. First, we used the boundary extension to preserve the signal boundary distortion and designed a first median filter with the time window at approximately 78 ms to eliminate the high-frequency components of the signal. Then, through the second median filter with a time window which was about 780 ms, we estimated the low-frequency components. Finally, we removed the estimated low-frequency components from the signal to obtain the denoised signal. Through comparing the multiple sets of signals under calmly sitting and slightly moving postures, the PPG signals contained noises no matter whether collected by the transmittance-mode or the reflectance-mode. To evaluate the proposed method, we conducted measured, simulated experiments and a strong noisy environment experiment. Through comparing the morphology distortions, frequency spectra, and the signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), the results showed that the proposed method can suppress noise effectively and preserve the essential morphological features from PPG signals. As a result, the proposed method can enhance the quality of PPG signals and, thus, can contribute to the improvement of the calculation accuracy of the subsequent physiological parameters. In addition, the proposed method could be a good choice to address the real-time noise reduction of portable PPG measuring instruments.

Pulse signals are widely used to evaluate the status of the human cardiovascular, respiratory, and circulatory systems. In the process of being collected, the signals are usually interfered by some factors, such as the spike noise and the poor-sensor-contact noise, which have severely affected the accuracy of the subsequent detection models. In recent years, some methods have been applied to processing the above noisy signals, such as dynamic time warping, empirical mode decomposition, autocorrelation, and cross-correlation. Effective as they are, those methods are complex and difficult to implement. It is also found that the noisy signals are tightly related to gross errors. The Chauvenet criterion, one of the gross error discrimination criterions, is highly efficient and widely applicable for being without the complex calculations like decomposition and reconstruction. Therefore, in this study, based on the Chauvenet criterion, a new pulse signal preprocessing method is proposed, in which adaptive thresholds are designed, respectively, to discriminate the abnormal signals caused by spike noise and poor-sensor-contact noise. 81 hours of pulse signals (with a sleep apnea annotated every 30 seconds and 9,720 segments in total) from the MIT-BIH Polysomnographic Database are used in the study, including 35 minutes of poor-sensor-contact noises and 25 minutes of spike noises. The proposed method was used to preprocess the pulse signals, in which 9,684 segments out of a total of 9,720 were correctly discriminated, and the accuracy of the method reached 99.63%. To quantitatively evaluate the noise removal effect, a simulation experiment is conducted to compare the Jaccard Similarity Coefficient (JSC) calculated before and after the noise removal, respectively, and the results show that the preprocessed signal obtains higher JSC, closer to the reference signal, which indicates that the proposed method can effectively improve the signal quality. In order to evaluate the method, three back-propagation (BP) sleep apnea detection models with the same network structure and parameters were established, respectively. Through comparing the recognition rate and the prediction rate of the models, higher rates were obtained by using the proposed method. To prove the efficiency, the comparison experiment between the proposed Chauvenet-based method and a Romanovsky-based method was conducted, and the execution time of the proposed method is much shorter than that of the Romanovsky method. The results suggest that the superiority in execution time of the Chauvenet-based method becomes more significant as the date size increases.

The noninvasive peripheral oxygen saturation (SpO₂) and the pulse rate can be extracted from photoplethysmography (PPG) signals. However, the accuracy of the extraction is directly affected by the quality of the signal obtained and the peak of the signal identified; therefore, a hybrid wavelet-based method is proposed in this study. Firstly, we suppressed the partial motion artifacts and corrected the baseline drift by using a wavelet method based on the principle of wavelet multiresolution. And then, we designed a quadratic spline wavelet modulus maximum algorithm to identify the PPG peaks automatically. To evaluate this hybrid method, a reflective pulse oximeter was used to acquire ten subjects’ PPG signals under sitting, raising hand, and gently walking postures, and the peak recognition results on the raw signal and on the corrected signal were compared, respectively. The results showed that the hybrid method not only corrected the morphologies of the signal well but also optimized the peaks identification quality, subsequently elevating the measurement accuracy of SpO₂ and the pulse rate. As a result, our hybrid wavelet-based method profoundly optimized the evaluation of respiratory function and heart rate variability analysis.