Detection of carotid artery stenosis via electronic stethoscope: A preliminary study with heart sound segmentation

Carotid stenosis is an important indicator and one of the main causes of ischemic stroke. Since the stenosis transformation is gradual, the patients usually can't be aware of abnormality immediately. Therefore a convenient non-invasive examination method is needed to help the general public monitor the status of carotid artery stenosis. In this work we used electronic stethoscope to record the sound of blood flow, and extract the systolic fragments. The experimental results reveal the approximate entropy can be used as a preliminary feature to detect carotid stenosis (p <0.01).