The use of machine learning for pattern recognition in magnetocardiography (MCG) that measures magnetic fields emitted by the electrophysiological activity of the heart is disclosed herein. Direct kernel methods are used to separate abnormal MCG heart patterns from normal ones. For unsupervised learning, Direct Kernel based Self-Organizing Maps are introduced. For supervised learning Direct Kernel Partial Least Squares and (Direct) Kernel Ridge Regression are used. These results are then compared with classical Support Vector Machines and Kernel Partial Least Squares. The hyper-parameters for these methods are tuned on a validation subset of the training data before testing. Also investigated is the most effective pre-processing, using local, vertical, horizontal and two-dimensional (global) Mahanalobis scaling, wavelet transforms, and variable selection by filtering.