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Nowadays, heart disease is the leading cause of death. The high mortality rate and escalating occurrence of heart diseases worldwide warrant the requirement for a fast and efficient diagnosis of such ailments. The purpose is to design an automated system for the classification of abnormal heartbeat audio signals to assist cardiologists. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that uses a single neural network model for the classification of eight different types of heartbeat audio signals. The proposed recurrent neural network (RNN) model using Long short-term memory (LSTM) is developed on two publically available databases such as the PASCAL challenge and the 2017 PhysioNet challenge. Mel frequency cepstrum coefficient (MFCC) is applied to extract the dominant features, and a bandpass filter is used to remove the noise from both of the datasets. Afterward, the downsampling technique is used to fix the size of the sampling rate of each sound signal to 20KHz and 300 Hz for the Pascal and PhysioNet database, respectively. The proposed model is compared with multi-layer perceptron (MLP) in terms of different performance evaluation matrices. Furthermore, the outcomes of five machine learning (ML) models are also analyzed. The proposed model has achieved the highest classification accuracy of 0.9971 on the Pascal database, and 0.9870 accuracy on the PhysioNet challenge dataset, which is consistently superior to its competitor approaches. The proposed model provides significant assistance to the cardiac consultant in detecting heart valve diseases.

Blockchain technology (BCT) has emerged in the last decade and added a lot of interest in the healthcare sector. The purpose of this systematic literature review (SLR) is to explore the potential paradigm shift in healthcare utilizing BCT. The study is compiled by reviewing research articles published in nine well-reputed venues such as IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, Springs Link, Scopus, Taylor & Francis, Science Direct, PsycINFO, Ovid Medline, and MDPI between January 2016 to August 2021. A total of 1,192 research studies were identified out of which 51 articles were selected based on inclusion criteria for this SLR that presents the modern information on the recent implications and gaps in the use of BCT for enhancing the healthcare procedures. According to the outcomes, BCT is being applied to design the novel and advanced interventions to enrich the current protocol of managing, distributing, and processing clinical records and personal medical information. BCT is enduring the conceptual development in the healthcare domain, where it has summed up the substantial elements through better and enhanced efficiency, technological innovation, access control, data privacy, and security. A framework is developed to address the probable field where future researchers can add considerable value, such as data protection, system architecture, and regulatory compliance. Finally, this SLR concludes that the upcoming research can support the pervasive implementation of BCT to address the critical dilemmas related to health diagnostics, enhancing the patient healthcare process in remote monitoring or emergencies, data integrity, and avoiding fraud.