Formant Detection Technique for the Phonocardiogram Spectra Using the 1st and 2nd Derivatives

This study describes a new method to analyze phonocardiogram acquired from electronic stethoscope. The method uses the formant frequencies of linear prediction spectrum of the phonocardiogram and proposes a novel method for formant detection using the smoothing and the first and second derivatives. For this, stethoscope sounds are acquired in university hospital. The stethoscope signals are preprocessed and analyzed by the Burg algorithm, a kind of linear prediction analysis. Based on the linear prediction spectra, the formant frequencies are estimated. The proposed method has shown better performance in formant frequency detection than the conventional peak picking method.