Source Separation of the Second Heart Sound via Alternating Optimization

A novel algorithm to separate S2 heart sounds into their aortic and pulmonary components is proposed. This approach is based on the assumption that, in different heartbeats of a given recording, aortic and pulmonary components maintain the same waveform but with different relative delays, which are induced by the variation of the thoracic pressure at different respiration phases. The proposed algorithm then retrieves the aortic and pulmonary components as the solution of an optimization problem which is approximated via alternating optimization. The proposed approach is shown to provide reconstructions of aortic and pulmonary components with normalized root mean-squared error consistently below 10% in various operational regimes.