Patent ID: 7300405

Claim:
A method comprising: mapping auscultatory sounds associated with known physiological conditions to a set of one or more disease regions defined within a multidimensional space by: (i) formulating a set of matrices that store digitized representations of the auscultatory sounds associated with the known physiological conditions, wherein each matrix is associated with a different one of the physiological conditions and stores the digitized representations of the auscultatory sounds associated with the respective physiological condition, and (ii) applying singular value decomposition (“SVD”) to each of the matrices to compute respective sets of sub-matrices that define the disease regions within the multidimensional space; programming a diagnostic device in accordance with configuration data generated by the application of SVD to the set of matrices, wherein the configuration data includes at least one of the sub-matrices associated with the different physiological conditions; generating, with the diagnostic device, a set of one or more vectors within the multidimensional space representative of auscultatory sounds associated with a patient; and outputting, with the diagnostic device, a diagnostic message associated with a physiological condition of the patient as a function of the vectors and the disease regions defined within the multidimensional space.