Physically Meaningful Surrogate Data for COPD

The rapidly increasing prevalence of debilitating breathing disorders, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), calls for a meaningful integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into respiratory healthcare. Deep learning techniques are “data hungry” whilst patient-based data is invariably expensive and time consuming to record. To this end, we introduce a novel COPD-simulator, a physical apparatus with an easy to replicate design which enables rapid and effective generation of a wide range of COPD-like data from healthy subjects, for enhanced training of deep learning frameworks. To ensure the faithfulness of our domain-aware COPD surrogates, the generated waveforms are examined through both flow waveforms and photoplethysmography (PPG) waveforms (as a proxy for intrathoracic pressure) in terms of duty cycle, sample entropy, FEV
₁
/FVC ratios and flow-volume loops. The proposed simulator operates on healthy subjects and is able to generate FEV
₁
/FVC obstruction ratios ranging from greater than 0.8 to less than 0.2, mirroring values that can observed in the full spectrum of real-world COPD. As a final stage of verification, a simple convolutional neural network is trained on surrogate data alone, and is used to accurately detect COPD in real-world patients. When training solely on surrogate data, and testing on real-world data, a comparison of true positive rate against false positive rate yields an area under the curve of 0.75, compared with 0.63 when training solely on real-world data.