A method for extracting and evaluating features from cardiac acoustic signals includes the steps of obtaining a cardiac acoustic signal, extracting physiologically significant features from the cardiac acoustic signal using a neural network, analyzing the cardiac acoustic signal with a wavelist decomposition to extract time-frequency information, and identifying basic heart sounds using neutral networks applied to the extracted time-frequency information. A method for determining a status of heart murmurs includes the steps of obtaining a cardiac acoustic signal, detecting a murmur, if any, from the cardiac acoustic signal, and determining whether the murmur is one of functional and pathological based upon expert rules.