Deep Learning-Based Classification of Common Lung Sounds via Auto-Detected Respiratory Cycles

Chronic respiratory diseases, the third leading cause of mortality on a global scale, can be diagnosed at an early stage through non-invasive auscultation. However, effective manual differentiation of lung sounds (LSs) requires not only sharp auditory skills but also significant clinical experience. With technological advancements, artificial intelligence (AI) has demonstrated the capability to distinguish LSs with accuracy comparable to or surpassing that of human experts. This study broadly compares the methods used in AI-based LSs classification. Firstly, respiratory cycles—consisting of inhalation and exhalation parts in LSs of different lengths depending on individual variability, obtained and labelled under expert guidance—were automatically detected using a series of signal processing procedures and a database was obtained in this way. This database of common LSs was then classified using various time-frequency representations such as spectrograms, scalograms, Mel-spectrograms and gammatonegrams for comparison. The utilisation of proven, convolutional neural network (CNN)-based pre-trained models through the application of transfer learning facilitated the comparison, thereby enabling the acquisition of the features to be employed in the classification process. The performances of CNN, CNN and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) hybrid architecture and support vector machine methods were compared in the classification process. When the spectral structure of gammatonegrams, which capture the spectral structure of signals in the low-frequency range with high fidelity and their noise-resistant structures, is combined with a CNN architecture, the best classification accuracy of 97.3% ± 1.9 is obtained.