Real-time Neonatal Chest Sound Separation using Deep Learning

Auscultation for neonates is a simple and non-invasive method of providing diagnosis for cardiovascular and respiratory disease. Such diagnosis often requires high-quality heart and lung sounds to be captured during auscultation. However, in most cases, obtaining such high-quality sounds is non-trivial due to the chest sounds containing a mixture of heart, lung, and noise sounds. As such, additional preprocessing is needed to separate the chest sounds into heart and lung sounds. This paper proposes a novel deep-learning approach to separate such chest sounds into heart and lung sounds. Inspired by the Conv-TasNet model, the proposed model has an encoder, decoder, and mask generator. The encoder consists of a 1D convolution model and the decoder consists of a transposed 1D convolution. The mask generator is constructed using stacked 1D convolutions and transformers. The proposed model outperforms previous methods in terms of objective distortion measures by 2.01 dB to 5.06 dB in the artificial dataset, as well as computation time, with at least a 17-time improvement. Therefore, our proposed model could be a suitable preprocessing step for any phonocardiogram-based health monitoring system.