A process for pre-processing recorded and digitized heart sounds and corresponding digitized ECG signals is provided. The pre-processed signals (203) are suitable for input into an automatic decision support system implemented by means of a diagnostic decision network (205), used for diagnosing and differentiation between normal/functional (206) and pathological (207) heart murmurs, particularly in pediatric patients. The process includes identifying or predicting locations of individual heart beats within the heart sound signal, identifying the positions of the S1 and S2 heart pulses within the respective heart beats, predicting and identifying the locations and durations of the systole and diastole segments of the heart beats (302), determining if segmentation of the heart sound signal is possible based on the selected and isolated heart beats (305), and the segmentation of the respective heart beats into segments for allowing better feature extraction. The invention also provides a process for detecting the QRS complex of an ECG signal for optimizing the number of heart beat cycles detected.
