A Blind Filtering Framework for Noisy Neonatal Chest Sounds

Chest sound— as the first and most commonly available vital signal for newborns— contains affluent information about their cardiac and respiratory health. However, neonatal lung sound auscultation is currently challenging and often unreliable due to the noise and interference, particularly for preterm infants. The noise often overlaps with the heart and lung contents in both time and frequency. Moreover, the frequency band of the useful components varies from one case to another, making it difficult to separate by fixed band-pass filtering. In this study, a single-channel Blind Source Separation (SCBSS) framework is proposed to separate newborns’ lung and heart sounds from noisy chest sounds recorded by a digital stethoscope. This method first decomposes the signal into a multi-resolution representation using a time-frequency transform, and then applies source separation algorithms, to find proper ad hoc frequency filters. In the simulation scenario, two different time-frequency transforms are considered; Stationary Wavelet Transform (SWT) with dyadic bases, and Continuous Wavelet Transform (CWT) with redundant bases. The transforms are followed by three different source separation methods, namely Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Periodic Component Analysis (
$\pi $
CA), and Second Order Blind Identification (SOBI). The yielded combinations are applied to the chest sounds recorded from ninety-one preterm and full-term newborns. The results show that compared to raw signals, fixed band-pass filtering and seven other separation methods, the heart and lung sounds extracted by the proposed methods have higher quality index and also result in more reliable heart and respiratory rate estimation.