A new tool for foetal phonocardiography simulation.

Among diagnostic techniques for foetal monitoring, phonocardiography is gaining more and more interest for its low cost, passive nature and capability to detect some cardiac diseases. In spite of these characteristics, its use in clinical routine is still limited due to different troubles; for example, signals recorded through maternal abdomen show generally a quite low signal-to-noise ratio, so that detection and analysis of foetal heart sounds result very difficult. In this scenario, the availability of artificial phonocardiographic signals, simulated with conditions resembling different foetal conditions, week of gestation and noise amount, to name someone, can be a very useful tool to train medical staff. In this paper a software for phonocardiography simulation, updated to take account also of the split is presented. The software is completed with a user interface which allow to modify in a simple way simulation parameters. It is worth highlighting that this software can be useful also for testing performances of other analysis software and mathematical tools for recognising of valves components in the heart sounds.