Deep Learning Based Portable Respiratory Sound Classification System

Respiratory diseases contribute to a majority of deaths worldwide every year. Diseases such as asthma, bronchitis and pneumonia also adversely impact a person's social and economic conditions. They can seriously threaten their health if left undiagnosed and untreated. Techniques such as auscultation are used in the diagnosis of most respiratory diseases. However, using such techniques requires an experienced physician and the diagnosis is subjective. To overcome these challenges, in this work, a portable handheld system has been proposed and a proof of concept implemented to detect and classify respiratory diseases automatically through the use of convolutional neural networks (CNN) running on mobile platforms. Mel spectrograms are generated from the audio signals and fed to the CNN for classification. This work makes use of the publicly available HF_Lung dataset. The classification accuracy achieved by the current implementation using a Raspberry Pi for processing is 80.55 % with a sensitivity of 95.65 % and specificity of 98.80 % on the HF_Lung dataset.