5 research outputs found
COVID-19 Detection from Respiratory Sounds with Hierarchical Spectrogram Transformers
Monitoring of prevalent airborne diseases such as COVID-19 characteristically
involves respiratory assessments. While auscultation is a mainstream method for
preliminary screening of disease symptoms, its utility is hampered by the need
for dedicated hospital visits. Remote monitoring based on recordings of
respiratory sounds on portable devices is a promising alternative, which can
assist in early assessment of COVID-19 that primarily affects the lower
respiratory tract. In this study, we introduce a novel deep learning approach
to distinguish patients with COVID-19 from healthy controls given audio
recordings of cough or breathing sounds. The proposed approach leverages a
novel hierarchical spectrogram transformer (HST) on spectrogram representations
of respiratory sounds. HST embodies self-attention mechanisms over local
windows in spectrograms, and window size is progressively grown over model
stages to capture local to global context. HST is compared against
state-of-the-art conventional and deep-learning baselines. Demonstrations on
crowd-sourced multi-national datasets indicate that HST outperforms competing
methods, achieving over 83% area under the receiver operating characteristic
curve (AUC) in detecting COVID-19 cases
Sightings of cetaceans in the Western Antarctic Peninsula during the first joint Turkish-Ukrainian Antarctic Research Expedition, 2016
During the cetacean surveys of the first Turkish-Ukrainian Antarctic Research Expedition conducted on 5-8 April 2016 in Lemaire Channel, Penola Strait, Flanders Bay, southern Gerlache Strait, and southern Neumayer Channel in the Western Antarctic Peninsula, 74 humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) in 24 sightings and 11 Antarctic minke whales (Balaenoptera bonaerensis) in 6 sightings were recorded. The overall encounter rate (number of sightings/survey effort in nautical miles) was 0.333 (0.266 for humpback whale, 0.066 for Antarctic minke whale). According to the sighting distribution, the Lemaire Channel and Penola Strait are important migration and feeding habitats for whales. Five humpback whales were photo-identified individually by natural features on their flukes; one of them had a match in the Antarctic Humpback Whale Catalogue. The matched individual was first recorded on 30 August 2007 at Salinas, Ecuador