The Assessment of Stent Effectiveness Using a Wearable Beamforming MEMS Microphone Array System

Studies involving turbulent flow have been carried out in many parts of the cardiovascular system, and it has been widely reported that turbulence related to stenosis (narrowing) of arteries creates audible sounds, which may be analyzed to yield information about the nature and severity of the blockage. Results so far indicate that the high frequency content of the sounds generally increases with the degree of stenosis. In this paper, we designed and built an MEMs microphone array and a signal acquisition board to improve the detection of coronary occlusions using an approach based on the recording and analysis of isolated diastolic heart sounds associated with turbulent blood flow in occluded coronary arteries. The nonlinear dynamic analysis method based on approximate entropy has been proposed for the analysis of diastolic heart sounds from patients with single coronary occlusions, before and after stent placement procedures. The nonlinear dynamic analysis (approximate entropy) measures of the diastolic heart sounds recorded from eight patients with single coronary occlusions and two normal subjects were estimated. In addition, a spectral analysis based on the fast Fourier transform was used to estimate the energy content of the recorded signals. Results suggest the presence of high nonlinear (approximate entropy) values of diastolic heart sounds associated with coronary artery disease (p < 0.01) as well as significant differences in the energy content of the heart sound signals above and below 150 Hz (p < 0.05).