Software Development for the Analysis of Heartbeat Sounds with LabVIEW in Diagnosis of Cardiovascular Disease

In this paper, a time-frequency spectral analysis software (Heart Sound Analyzer) for the computer-aided analysis of cardiac sounds has been developed with LabVIEW. Software modules reveal important information for cardiovascular disorders, it can also assist to general physicians to come up with more accurate and reliable diagnosis at early stages. Heart sound analyzer (HSA) software can overcome the deficiency of expert doctors and help them in rural as well as urban clinics and hospitals. HSA has two main blocks: data acquisition and pre-processing, time–frequency spectral analyses. The heart sounds are first acquired using a modified stethoscope which has an electret microphone in it. Then, the signals are analysed using the time–frequency/scale spectral analysis techniques such as STFT, Wigner–Ville distribution and wavelet transforms. HSA modules have been tested with real heart sounds from 35 volunteers and proved to be quite efficient and robust while dealing with a large variety of pathological conditions.