text: The work presented here applies deep learning to the task of automated cardiac auscultation, i.e. recognizing abnormalities in heart sounds. We describe an automated heart sound classification algorithm that combines the use of time-frequency heat map representations with a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). Given the cost-sensitive nature of misclassification, our CNN architecture is trained using a modified loss function that directly optimizes the trade-off between sensitivity and specificity. We evaluated our algorithm at the 2016 PhysioNet Computing in Cardiology challenge where the objective was to accurately classify normal and abnormal heart sounds from single, short, potentially noisy recordings. Our entry to the challenge achieved a final specificity of 0.95, sensitivity of 0.73 and overall score of 0.84. We achieved the greatest specificity score out of all challenge entries and, using just a single CNN, our algorithm differed in overall score by only 0.02 compared to the top place finisher, which used an ensemble approach.
  @cite_27: This is an author-created, un-copyedited version of an article published in Physiological Measurement. IOP Publishing Ltd is not responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or any version derived from it. The Version of Record is available online at https: doi.org 10.1088 0967-3334 37 12 2181
summary: While there have been many previous efforts applied to automated heart sound analysis, gauging the success of historical approaches has been somewhat difficult, due to differences in dataset quality, number of recordings available for training and testing algorithms, recorded signal lengths and the environment in which data was collected (e.g. clinical vs. non-clinical settings). Moreover, some existing works have not performed appropriate train-test data splits and have reported results on training or validation data, which is highly likely to produce optimistic results due to overfitting @cite_27 . In this work, we report results from the 2016 PhysioNet Computing in Cardiology Challenge, which evaluated entries on a large test-set that was not made publicly available. To reduce overfitting, no recordings from the same subject were included in both the training and the test set and a variety of both and PCG recordings, which exhibited very poor signal quality, were included to encourage the development of accurate and robust algorithms.