An LSTM-based Listener for Early Detection of Heart Disease

As a contribution to the George B. Moody PhysioNet Challenge 2022 we (team listNto_urHeart) propose a phonocardiogram classifier. Based on the assumption that these recordings bear similarity to music, we borrow methods from the field of computational music analysis. In contrast to end-to-end machine learning approaches, we propose a carefully-crafted processing pipeline for automatically detecting single heartbeats in phonocardiogram recordings which are then classified by a bi-directional long short-term memory network. Our approach has the advantage of not requiring manual annotations during training, therefore alleviating the lack of annotated training data. In murmur detection, we reached a weighted accuracy of 0.68 in validation, 0.668 in test (rank: 25/40) and 0.64 $\pm 0.08$ during training. In predicting patient outcome, we reached 10,362 in validation, 13,866 in test (rank: 27 /39) and 11, $386\pm 2,108$ during training. The results indicate that borrowing algorithms from computational music analysis could bear the potential to address challenges in phonocardiogram classification successfully.