Deep learning based respiratory sound analysis for detection of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

In recent times, technologies such as machine learning and deep learning have played a vital role in providing assistive solutions to a medical domain’s challenges. They also improve predictive accuracy for early and timely disease detection using medical imaging and audio analysis. Due to the scarcity of trained human resources, medical practitioners are welcoming such technology assistance as it provides a helping hand to them in coping with more patients. Apart from critical health diseases such as cancer and diabetes, the impact of respiratory diseases is also gradually on the rise and is becoming life-threatening for society. The early diagnosis and immediate treatment are crucial in respiratory diseases, and hence the audio of the respiratory sounds is proving very beneficial along with chest X-rays. The presented research work aims to apply Convolutional Neural Network based deep learning methodologies to assist medical experts by providing a detailed and rigorous analysis of the medical respiratory audio data for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary detection. In the conducted experiments, we have used a Librosa machine learning library features such as MFCC, Mel-Spectrogram, Chroma, Chroma (Constant-Q) and Chroma CENS. The presented system could also interpret the severity of the disease identified, such as mild, moderate, or acute. The investigation results validate the success of the proposed deep learning approach. The system classification accuracy has been enhanced to an ICBHI score of 93%. Furthermore, in the conducted experiments, we have applied K-fold Cross-Validation with ten splits to optimize the performance of the presented deep learning approach.