September 19, 2010
School of Engineering, Coimbatore
Electronics Letters is a bi-weekly international journal committed to the rapid dissemination of ground-breaking research in electronics and electrical engineering. A recent issue featured research at Amrita as its cover story.
“This is a clear indication that our research is being recognized at the highest quarters,” proudly stated Amrita’s Vice-Chancellor, Dr. Venkat Rangan.
Titled The Heart of the Matter, the cover story featured a new method developed by the Amrita scientists that could be used to detect and monitor finer details in heart sound signals.
“The reliable detection of low-intensity heart sounds in phonocardiogram (PCG) signals has been made possible with a new heart sound activity detection (HSAD) method,” the cover story stated.
“Dr. M. Sabarimalai Manikandan and Dr. K. P. Soman from the Centre for Excellence in Computational Engineering and Networking, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham in India have developed a robust algorithm that can detect not only the loudest sounds, but also other heart events that are frequently missed, such as heart murmurs.”
Why was this important? What was the work’s significance? The cover story proceeded to explain.
“It has great potential within the field of PCG signal processing for the development of robust, accurate, automated computer-aided diagnostic systems, biometric systems with high recognition accuracy and efficient sound enhancement and coding systems…The reliable and accurate detection of endpoints of all heart sounds has remained as a very challenging problem.”
The cover story went on to explain more.
“The identification of the boundaries of all heart sounds, especially in realistic environments where the signal is corrupted by noise and artifacts, is very important for automated heart sound analysis. Sabarimalai Manikandan and Soman have developed a new methodology that also detects the low-intensity S3 and S4 heart sounds and murmurs, even under noisy environments.”
The story focused on the duo’s plans for taking the work forward.
“Through tests on a large scale PCG database, they found that their method significantly outperformed the other HSAD methods under varying levels of heart sounds and different types of noise. To further develop their work, they will now be focusing on the creation of a heart sound signal database for testing purposes, and they are currently developing implementations of their algorithm on other platforms in order to study the feasibility of this approach in real-time environments.”
“Amongst their many other related projects, they are working towards developing an automated computer aided heart sound diagnostic (CAHSD) system. By exploiting state-of-the-art sensors and digital signal processing techniques, they hope that a robust, accurate CAHSD system will soon become feasible at low cost, and will also become an integral part of home healthcare and mobile telemedicine services.”
Amrita congratulates its scientists whose work is being applauded in such distinguished platforms.
