Acoustical detection of coronary occlusions using neural networks.

A nonlinear neural network classifier was applied to noninvasive acoustic detection of coronary artery disease; the classifier included a feature vector, derived from diastolic heart sounds, and a multi-layered network trained by the backpropagation. The feature vector is based on the linear prediction coefficients of the autoregressive method after an adaptive line enhancement method was used as the input pattern to the neural network. One hundred and twelve recordings (70 abnormal, 42 normal) were studied and the network was trained on a randomly chosen set of six abnormal and six normal patients. It was tested on a database consisting of 100 recordings to which it had not been exposed. The network correctly identified 50 of the 64 patients with coronary artery disease and 32 of the 36 patients without any coronary artery occlusions. These results showed that this neural network is capable of distinguishing normal patients from abnormal patients. In addition, the diagnostic capability of this approach is much better than any other available noninvasive approach.