Can Machine Learning Be Used to Recognize and Diagnose Coughs?

Emerging wireless technologies, such as 5G and beyond, are bringing new use cases to the forefront, one of the most prominent being machine learning empowered health care. One of the notable modern medical concerns that impose an immense worldwide health burden are respiratory infections. Since cough is an essential symptom of many respiratory infections, an automated system to screen for respiratory diseases based on raw cough data would have a multitude of beneficial research and medical applications. In literature, machine learning has already been successfully used to detect cough events in controlled environments. In this paper, we present a low complexity, automated recognition and diagnostic tool for screening respiratory infections that utilizes Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to detect cough within environment audio and diagnose three potential illnesses (i.e., bronchitis, bronchiolitis and pertussis) based on their unique cough audio features. Both proposed detection and diagnosis models achieve an accuracy of over 89%, while also remaining computationally efficient. Results show that the proposed system is successfully able to detect and separate cough events from background noise. Moreover, the proposed single diagnosis model is capable of distinguishing between different illnesses without the need of separate models.Comment: Accepted in IEEE International Conference on E-Health and Bioengineering - EHB 202

Deep recurrent neural networks with attention mechanisms for respiratory anomaly classification.

In recent years, a variety of deep learning techniques and methods have been adopted to provide AI solutions to issues within the medical field, with one specific area being audio-based classification of medical datasets. This research aims to create a novel deep learning architecture for this purpose, with a variety of different layer structures implemented for undertaking audio classification. Specifically, bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) networks in conjunction with an attention mechanism, are implemented in this research for chronic and non-chronic lung disease and COVID-19 diagnosis. We employ two audio datasets, i.e. the Respiratory Sound and the Coswara datasets, to evaluate the proposed model architectures pertaining to lung disease classification. The Respiratory Sound Database contains audio data with respect to lung conditions such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) and asthma, while the Coswara dataset contains coughing audio samples associated with COVID-19. After a comprehensive evaluation and experimentation process, as the most performant architecture, the proposed attention BiLSTM network (A-BiLSTM) achieves accuracy rates of 96.2% and 96.8% for the Respiratory Sound and the Coswara datasets, respectively. Our research indicates that the implementation of the BiLSTM and attention mechanism was effective in improving performance for undertaking audio classification with respect to various lung condition diagnoses

Сверточная нейронная сеть для ИТ-диагностики легких

Предметом исследований является использовании технологии обработки голоса пациента в ИТ- медицине. Цель статьи – разработать нейронную сеть для диагностики заболеваний легких с помощью звукового анализа голоса пациента. Исследование включает в себя обучение нейронной сети, разработку мобильной программы для сбора звука пациента, извлечение звуковых характеристик на стороне сервера, диагностику звуковых данных с использованием обученной нейронной сети и возврат результатов диагностики в мобильную программу приложения. Представлена блок-схема обработки голоса от исходного сигнала до извлечения аудиофайла, в качестве примера приведено извлечение функций MFCC и FBank. Приведена структура сверточной нейронной сети (CNN), которая была обучена на стандарном наборе данных респираторных заболеваний. Приведен упрощенный процесс классификации звуков дыхания, необходимых для прогнозирования заболеваний легких. Для практической реализации использована в среде программирования Pyton сеть VGGish, которая имеет сетевые параметры, обученные с помощью набора данных. Эксприменты проведены на платформе Android service framework, которая разделена на две части: Android front-end и серверную. Интерфейсная часть реализует интерактивную функцию пользователя и отвечает за ввод аудиоданных. После загрузки аудио сервер выполнит предварительную обработку аудио, и вызовет CNN для классификации аудио, результаты возвращаются во внешний модуль на смартфоне. Лучшая точность модели достигла 83,6 %

Classification of phonocardiograms with convolutional neural networks

The diagnosis of heart diseases from heart sounds is a matter of many years. This is the effect of having too many people with heart diseases in the world. Studies on heart sounds are usually based on classification for helping doctors. In other words, these studies are a substructure of clinical decision support systems. In this study, three different heart sound data in the PASCAL Btraining data set such as normal, murmur, and extrasystole are classified. Phonocardiograms which were obtained from heart sounds in the data set were used for classification. Both Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) were used for classification to compare obtained results. In these studies, the obtained results show that the CNN classification gives the better result with 97.9% classification accuracy according to the results of ANN. Thus, CNN emerges as the ideal classification tool for the classification of heart sounds with variable characteristics

Automatic lung health screening using respiratory sounds

Significant changes have been made on audio-based technologies over years in several different fields. Healthcare is no exception. One of such avenues is health screening based on respiratory sounds. In this paper, we developed a tool to detect respiratory sounds that come from respiratory infection carrying patients. Linear Predictive Cepstral Coefficient (LPCC)-based features were used to characterize such audio clips. With Multilayer Perceptron (MLP)-based classifier, in our experiment, we achieved the highest possible accuracy of 99.22% that was tested on a publicly available respiratory sounds dataset (ICBHI17) (Rocha et al. Physiol. Meas. 40(3):035,001 20) of size 6800+ clips. In addition to other popular machine learning classifiers, our results outperformed common works that exist in the literature

Lung Sounds Classification Based on Time Domain Features

Signal complexity in lung sounds is assumed to be able to differentiate and classify characteristic lung sound between normal and abnormal in most cases. Previous research has employed a variety of modification approaches to obtain lung sound features. In contrast to earlier research, time-domain features were used to extract features in lung sound classification. Electromyogram (EMG) signal analysis frequently employs this time-domain characteristic. Time-domain features are MAV, SSI, Var, RMS, LOG, WL, AAC, DASDV, and AFB. The benefit of this method is that it allows for direct feature extraction without the requirement for transformation. Several classifiers were used to examine five different types of lung sound data. The highest accuracy was 93.9 percent, obtained Using the decision tree with 9 types of time-domain features. The proposed method could extract features from lung sounds as an alternative

Benchmarking of eight recurrent neural network variants for breath phase and adventitious sound detection on a self-developed open-access lung sound database-HF_Lung_V1

A reliable, remote, and continuous real-time respiratory sound monitor with automated respiratory sound analysis ability is urgently required in many clinical scenarios-such as in monitoring disease progression of coronavirus disease 2019-to replace conventional auscultation with a handheld stethoscope. However, a robust computerized respiratory sound analysis algorithm has not yet been validated in practical applications. In this study, we developed a lung sound database (HF_Lung_V1) comprising 9,765 audio files of lung sounds (duration of 15 s each), 34,095 inhalation labels, 18,349 exhalation labels, 13,883 continuous adventitious sound (CAS) labels (comprising 8,457 wheeze labels, 686 stridor labels, and 4,740 rhonchi labels), and 15,606 discontinuous adventitious sound labels (all crackles). We conducted benchmark tests for long short-term memory (LSTM), gated recurrent unit (GRU), bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), bidirectional GRU (BiGRU), convolutional neural network (CNN)-LSTM, CNN-GRU, CNN-BiLSTM, and CNN-BiGRU models for breath phase detection and adventitious sound detection. We also conducted a performance comparison between the LSTM-based and GRU-based models, between unidirectional and bidirectional models, and between models with and without a CNN. The results revealed that these models exhibited adequate performance in lung sound analysis. The GRU-based models outperformed, in terms of F1 scores and areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves, the LSTM-based models in most of the defined tasks. Furthermore, all bidirectional models outperformed their unidirectional counterparts. Finally, the addition of a CNN improved the accuracy of lung sound analysis, especially in the CAS detection tasks.Comment: 48 pages, 8 figures. To be submitte

Automatic classification of adventitious respiratory sounds: a (un)solved problem?

(1) Background: Patients with respiratory conditions typically exhibit adventitious respiratory sounds (ARS), such as wheezes and crackles. ARS events have variable duration. In this work we studied the influence of event duration on automatic ARS classification, namely, how the creation of the Other class (negative class) affected the classifiers’ performance. (2) Methods: We conducted a set of experiments where we varied the durations of the other events on three tasks: crackle vs. wheeze vs. other (3 Class); crackle vs. other (2 Class Crackles); and wheeze vs. other (2 Class Wheezes). Four classifiers (linear discriminant analysis, support vector machines, boosted trees, and convolutional neural networks) were evaluated on those tasks using an open access respiratory sound database. (3) Results: While on the 3 Class task with fixed durations, the best classifier achieved an accuracy of 96.9%, the same classifier reached an accuracy of 81.8% on the more realistic 3 Class task with variable durations. (4) Conclusion: These results demonstrate the importance of experimental design on the assessment of the performance of automatic ARS classification algorithms. Furthermore, they also indicate, unlike what is stated in the literature, that the automatic classification of ARS is not a solved problem, as the algorithms’ performance decreases substantially under complex evaluation scenarios.publishe