A new heart sounds segmentation approach based on the correlation between ECG and PCG signals

During the cardiac cycle, both electrical and mechanical events are present. In fact, the electrocardiogram (ECG) allows the exploration of the electrical activity of the heart, while the phonocardiogram (PCG) constitutes a complementary tool to record the mechanical activity of the heart. The aim of our work is to develop a new approach for heart sounds segmentation based on the correlation between ECG and PCG signals for measurement of systolic time interval. Two different groups of simultaneous recordings of ECG and PCG signals were tested in this study. The performance of automatic heart sounds localisation process is compared with that of manual measurements made by two experts. The results obtained are interesting especially for pathological cases heart sound.