Lightweight Skip Connections With Efficient Feature Stacking for Respiratory Sound Classification

As the number of deaths from respiratory diseases due to COVID-19 and infectious diseases increases, early diagnosis is necessary. In general, the diagnosis of diseases is based on imaging devices (e.g., computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging) as well as the patient’s underlying disease information. However, these examinations are time-consuming, incur considerable costs, and in a situation like the ongoing pandemic, face-to-face examinations are difficult to conduct. Therefore, we propose a lung disease classification model based on deep learning using non-contact auscultation. In this study, two respiratory specialists collected normal respiratory sounds and five types of abnormal sounds associated with lung disease, including those associated with four lung lesions in the left and right anterior chest and left and right posterior chest. For preprocessing and feature extraction, the noise was removed using three pass filters (low, band, and high), and respiratory sound features were extracted using the Log-Mel Spectrogram-Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient followed by feature stacking. Then, we propose a lung disease classification model of dense lightweight convolutional neural network-bidirectional gated recurrent unit skip connections using depthwise separable convolution based on the extracted respiratory sound information. The performance of the classification model was compared with both the baseline and the lightweight models. The results indicate that the proposed model achieves high performance and has an accuracy of 92.3%, sensitivity of 92.1%, specificity of 98.5%, and f1-score of 91.9%. Using the proposed model, we aim to contribute to the early detection of diseases during the COVID-19 pandemic.