Towards using Cough for Respiratory Disease Diagnosis by leveraging Artificial Intelligence: A Survey

Cough acoustics contain multitudes of vital information about pathomorphological alterations in the respiratory system. Reliable and accurate detection of cough events by investigating the underlying cough latent features and disease diagnosis can play an indispensable role in revitalizing the healthcare practices. The recent application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and advances of ubiquitous computing for respiratory disease prediction has created an auspicious trend and myriad of future possibilities in the medical domain. In particular, there is an expeditiously emerging trend of Machine learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL)-based diagnostic algorithms exploiting cough signatures. The enormous body of literature on cough-based AI algorithms demonstrate that these models can play a significant role for detecting the onset of a specific respiratory disease. However, it is pertinent to collect the information from all relevant studies in an exhaustive manner for the medical experts and AI scientists to analyze the decisive role of AI/ML. This survey offers a comprehensive overview of the cough data-driven ML/DL detection and preliminary diagnosis frameworks, along with a detailed list of significant features. We investigate the mechanism that causes cough and the latent cough features of the respiratory modalities. We also analyze the customized cough monitoring application, and their AI-powered recognition algorithms. Challenges and prospective future research directions to develop practical, robust, and ubiquitous solutions are also discussed in detail.Comment: 30 pages, 12 figures, 9 table

Environment Knowledge-Driven Generic Models to Detect Coughs From Audio Recordings

Goal: Millions of people are dying due to res- piratory diseases, such as COVID-19 and asthma, which are often characterized by some common symptoms, including coughing. Therefore, objective reporting of cough symp- toms utilizing environment-adaptive machine-learning models with microphone sensing can directly contribute to respiratory disease diagnosis and patient care. Methods: In this work, we present three generic modeling approaches – unguided, semi-guided, and guided approaches consid- ering three potential scenarios, i.e., when a user has no prior knowledge, some knowledge, and detailed knowledge about the environments, respectively. Results: From detailed analysis with three datasets, we find that guided models are up to 28% more accurate than the unguided models. We find reasonable performance when assessing the applicability of our models using three additional datasets, including two open-sourced cough datasets. Con- clusions: Though guided models outperform other models, they require a better understanding of the environment

PRACTICAL COUGH DETECTION IN PRESENCE OF BACKGROUND NOISE AND PRELIMINARY DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSIS FROM COUGH SOUND USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Cough is one of the most common symptoms for many of the diseases. Physicians have been using characteristics of cough for preliminary diagnosis of certain respiratory diseases for ages. But the methods have been subjective and often depend on self-reported history and description of cough by the patients. Recently, with advent of the omnipresent recording devices and advances in machine learning capabilities, many studies have attempted to partially fill the gap. These studies have approached the problem objectively to create devices like cough monitors, cough counters, and partial automatic cough detection using machine learning. There is still a huge gap that exists in detecting and diagnosing the cough in a practical way. This study is an attempt to contribute towards filling this gap. We propose and analyze a machine learning based method to automatically detect cough in presence of background noise. After successful cough detection, we investigate the possibility of preliminary differential diagnosis by distinguishing the cough associated with Asthma, Bronchitis, Bronchiolitis, Pertussis patients and healthy people. As more training data could be collected for cough and non-cough sounds, it allowed us to leverage the potential of powerful deep architecture like ResNet for the cough detection part. For the diagnosis part of the work, not much data was available. In this case the preliminary results show that XGBoost performed better than CNN and ResNet architectures. While the cough detection part of the study offers mature results, lot more cough sound data for the examined diseases is needed before generalizable conclusions can be drawn from the diagnosis results observed in this study

Spectrogram Window Comparison: Cough Sound Recognition using Convolutional Neural Network

 Cough is one of the most common symptoms of diseases, especially respiratory diseases. Quick cough detection can be the key to the current pandemic of COVID-19. Good cough recognition is the one that uses non-intrusive tools such as a mobile phone microphone that does not disable human activities like stick sensors. To do sound-only detection, Deep Learning current best method Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used. However, CNN needs image input while sound input differs (one dimension rather than two). An extra process is needed, converting sound data to image data using a spectrogram. When building a spectrogram, there is a question about the best size. This research will compare the spectrogram's size, called Spectrogram Window, by the performance. The result is that windows with 4 seconds have the highest F1-score performance at 92.9%. Therefore, a window of around 4 seconds will perform better for sound recognition problems

Speech processing with deep learning for voice-based respiratory diagnosis : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand

Voice-based respiratory diagnosis research aims at automatically screening and diagnosing respiratory-related symptoms (e.g., smoking status, COVID-19 infection) from human-generated sounds (e.g., breath, cough, speech). It has the potential to be used as an objective, simple, reliable, and less time-consuming method than traditional biomedical diagnosis methods. In this thesis, we conduct one comprehensive literature review and propose three novel deep learning methods to enrich voice-based respiratory diagnosis research and improve its performance. Firstly, we conduct a comprehensive investigation of the effects of voice features on the detection of smoking status. Secondly, we propose a novel method that uses the combination of both high-level and low-level acoustic features along with deep neural networks for smoking status identification. Thirdly, we investigate various feature extraction/representation methods and propose a SincNet-based CNN method for feature representations to further improve the performance of smoking status identification. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systemic study that applies speech processing with deep learning for voice-based smoking status identification. Moreover, we propose a novel transfer learning scheme and a task-driven feature representation method for diagnosing respiratory diseases (e.g., COVID-19) from human-generated sounds. We find those transfer learning methods using VGGish, wav2vec 2.0 and PASE+, and our proposed task-driven method Sinc-ResNet have achieved competitive performance compared with other work. The findings of this study provide a new perspective and insights for voice-based respiratory disease diagnosis. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods and show that they have achieved better performances compared to other existing methods