A method for extracting features from cardiac acoustic signals includes the steps of obtaining a cardiac acoustic signal (216), and extracting physiologically significant features from the cardiac acoustic signal using a neural network (242). A method for evaluating cardiac acoustic signals includes the steps of obtaining a cardiac acoustic signal (216), analyzing the cardiac acoustic signal with a wavelet decomposition to extract time-frequency information (240), and identifying basic heart sounds using neural networks applied to the extracted time-frequency information (242). A method for determining cardiac event sequences from cardiac acoustic signals includes the steps of obtaining a cardiac acoustic signal (216), and processing a sequence of features extracted from the cardiac acoustic signal by a probabilistic finite-state automaton to determine a most probable sequence of cardiac events given the cardiac acoustic signal (244).
Multi-modal cardiac diagnostic decision support system