Comparative study of respiratory sounds classification methods based on cepstral analysis and artificial neural networks.

In this paper, we investigated and evaluated various machine learning-based approaches for automatically detecting wheezing sounds. We conducted a comprehensive comparison of these proposed systems, assessing their classification performance through metrics such as Sensitivity, Specificity, and Accuracy. The main approach to developing a machine learning-based system for classifying respiratory sounds involved the combination of a technique for extracting features from an unknown input sound with a classification method to determine its belonging class. The characterization techniques used in this study are based on the cepstral analysis, which was extensively employed in the automatic speech recognition field. While MFCC (Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients) feature extraction methods are commonly used in respiratory sounds classification, our study introduces a novelty by employing GFCC (Gammatone-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients) and BFCC (Bark-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients) for this purpose. For the classification task, we employed two types of neural networks: the MLP (Multilayer Perceptron), a feedforward neural network, and a variant of the LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) recurrent neural network called BiLSTM (Bidirectional LSTM). The proposed classification systems are evaluated using a database consisting of 497 wheezing segments and 915 normal respiratory segments, which are recorded from individuals diagnosticated with asthma and individuals without any respiratory issues, respectively. The highest classification performance was achieved by the BFCC-BiLSTM model, which demonstrated an exceptional accuracy rate of 99.8%.