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This study presents a computer-assisted auscultation approach for patent ductus arteriosus (PDA) detection. PDA is a frequent congenital heart disease in neonates. The early detection of the PDA murmur from a neonate’s heart sound is important to avoid the development of severe respiratory diseases in newborns. Computer-assisted auscultation has the potential to become a heart disease screening tool because it can improve the sensitivity and specificity of heart murmur detection. This study proposes an auditory time–frequency representation method (auditory spectrogram) to demonstrate the dynamic and non-stationary characteristics of heart murmurs. The auditory spectrogram is obtained using the proposed cochlear wavelet transform, which mimics the auditory response of the cochlea in the human auditory system. The auditory spectrogram can represent the heart sounds in the time–frequency domain to assist cardiac auscultation. Furthermore, the spectrum flux and spectrum centroid are used to characterize the configuration of the auditory spectrogram. The phonocardiogram data of 18 patients, including normal heart sounds, innocent murmurs, and PDA murmurs, are used in the blind test for algorithm effectiveness assessment. The results demonstrate that the proposed computer-assisted auscultation method can achieve a high sensitivity of 100 % and a specificity of 91.67 % for PDA detection. The developed method is robust, cost-effective, and convenient, making it effective for the enhancement of the accuracy of PDA detection.

Persistent patency of the arterial duct represents one of the most common lesions in the field of congenital cardiac disease. Failure of the ductus arteriosus closed within 48-96 hours of postnatal age results in a left to right shunt across the ductus and overloading of the pulmonary circulation. This is more likely to happen in premature neonates with respiratory distress syndrome. The assessment of the patent ductus arteriosis (PDA) with simple and noninvasive measurement equipment, such as phonocardiography (PCG), could be of great significance. Inspired by the auditory processing, we propose the cochlear spectrogram (CS) which is a novel spectro-temporal representation method to describe the cochlear responses of human hearing. Furthermore, the temporal correlogram (TC) method is used for analyze the temporal features of heart sounds. The preliminary study results recruited two infant cases of typical PDA, the heart murmur were recorded before and after-transcatheter closure of PDA using the AMPLATZER ductal occlude system. The proposed method could be used to evaluate the procedure response. Furthermore, we utilized the auditory-inspired heart sound temporal analysis with the combination of CS and TC method to predict closure outcome of preterm newborns with PDA in the future.