Journal of Applied Sciences1812-56541812-5662Asian Network for Scientific Information10.3923/jas.2011.3161.3168KhorasaniEhsan SafarDoraisamyShyamala AzmanAzreen 1220111117In this study, a musical approach to provide an automatic heart disease detection system is proposed. Heart sounds are recorded with audio format. Audio files are converted to semi-structured music files that can be represented textually. Samples were captured from different heart diseases and were stored in a database. Two different approaches which are information retrieval based on n-gram and longest common subsequence are used to retrieve the similarity of a given sample with existing heart diseases in the database. Since the frequency of heart sound is relative to age and physical characteristics of a patient, an important feature of using n-gram in this study is to retrieve diseases without respect to the different heart sounds frequencies. The effects of window sizes for n-gram approach on the accuracy of the information retrieval were tested and a proper window size was extracted. The results of the performed experiments showed that window size of 5 notes revealed a high performance in comparison with other window sizes. Hence, the proposed technique can detect and recognize a heart disease with a reliable accuracy. Average of precision values for around 85% in information retrieval and 55% in longest common subsequence technique were obtained for the retrieval of heart sound categories. Moreover, the results of string matching technique demonstrated that threshold level of 65% could appropriately detect heart disease.]]>Amien, M.B.M. and J. Lin,20077965971Andreoli, T.E., C.C.J. Carpenter, R.C. Griggs and I. Benjamin,20077th Edn.,Arvin, F. and S. Doraisamy,20105595600Arvin, F. and S. Doraismay,20102010pp: 130133Babaei, S. and A. Geranmayeh, 200939815Bergroth, L., H. Hakonen and T. Raita,20002000pp: 3948Crawford, M.H.,20093rd Edn.,pp: 556pp: 556Dokur, Z. and T. Olmez,200818951959Doraisamy, S. and S. Ruger,2003215370El-Asir, B. and K. Mayyas,200433643El-Ramsisi, A.M. and H.A. Khalil,2007739713976Gupta, C.N., R. Palaniappan, S. Swaminathan and S.M. Krishnan,20077286297Hebden, J.E. and J.N. Torry, 199724109112Hendel, M., A. Benyettou, F. Hendel and H. Khelil,20101015541562Itou, N. and K. Nishimoto,20072007pp: 183189Manning, C.D., P. Raghavan and H. Schutze,2008pp: 482pp: 482Meadow, C.T., B.R. Boyce and D.H. Kraft,19992nd Edn.,pp: 364pp: 364Modegi, T.,200184366370Phua, K., J. Chen, T.H. Dat and L. Shue,200841906919Roark, B., M. Saraclar and M. Collins,200721373392Vijila, C.K.S., M.E.P. Kanagasabapathy and S. Johnson,20066251256Syeda-Mahmood, T. and F. Wang,20085303568581Swarnalatha, R. and D.V. Prasad,201010319324Wang, P., Y. Kim, L.H. Ling and C.B. Soh,20052005pp: 55195522