Effect of Heart murmurs on Heart Rate Study

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to present a straightforward framework for Heart Rate (HR) estimation from a Phonocardiogram (PCG) records and study the impact of murmur severity on HR. The system focuses primarily on data processing procedure, which is based on signal preprocessing using Maximal Overlap Discrete Wavelet Transform (MODWT) to delineate murmurs from heart sounds. We exploit the characteristics of Logistic function to derive an enhanced PCG envelop that serves as prerequisite for HR algorithm detection. In fact, the PCG envelop present a cyclostationarity that can be easily detected throughout a cross-covariance autocorrelation function to calculate the Heart Rate (HR). In addition, the effect of minor and pronounced murmurs is gauged by the Energetic Ratio (ER) that provide a comprehensive idea about the superimposed murmur energy on first and second Heart sounds. The study was conducted on PASCAL datasets with 335 real clinical records. Results shows that subjects with Heart murmurs present an averaged Heart Rate (HR ≈ 77 bpm) is within the normal range in mild and medium murmurs. These findings suggests that the change in heart rate is not associated with the severity of murmur that occurs in structural heart valve disorder. A result that could be valuable to medical professionals operating in the emergency departments.