Detection of Respiratory Sounds Based on Wavelet Coefficients and Machine Learning

Respiratory sounds reveal important information of the lungs of patients. However, the analysis of lung sounds depends significantly on the medical skills and diagnostic experience of the physicians and is a time-consuming process. The development of an automatic respiratory sound classification system based on machine learning would, therefore, be beneficial. In this study, 705 respiratory sound signals (240 crackles, 260 rhonchi, and 205 normal respiratory sounds) were acquired from 130 patients. We found that similarities between the original and wavelet decomposed signals reflected the frequency of the signals. The Gaussian kernel function was used to evaluate the wavelet signal similarity. We combined the wavelet signal similarity with the relative wavelet energy and wavelet entropy as the feature vector. A 5-fold cross-validation was applied to assess the performance of the system. The artificial neural network model, which was applied, achieved the classification accuracy and classified the respiratory sound signals with an accuracy of 85.43%.