A telemedicine tool to detect pulmonary pathology using computerized pulmonary acoustic signal analysis

Background: Detection and monitoring of respiratory related illness is an important aspect in pulmonary medicine. Acoustic signals extracted from the human body are considered in detection of respiratory pathology accurately. Objectives: The aim of this study is to develop a prototype telemedicine tool to detect respiratory pathology using computerized respiratory sound analysis. Methods: Around 120 subjects (40 normal, 40 continuous lung sounds (20 wheeze and 20 rhonchi)) and 40 discontinuous lung sounds (20 fine crackles and 20 coarse crackles) were included in this study. The respiratory sounds were segmented into respiratory cycles using fuzzy inference system and then S-transform was applied to these respiratory cycles. From the S-transform matrix, statistical features were extracted. The extracted features were statistically significant with p < 0.05. To classify the respiratory pathology KNN, SVM and ELM classifiers were implemented using the statistical features obtained from of the data. Results: The validation showed that the classification rate for training for ELM classifier with RBF kernel was high compared to the SVM and KNN classifiers. The time taken for training the classifier was also less in ELM compared to SVM and KNN classifiers. The overall mean classification rate for ELM classifier was 98.52%. Conclusion: The telemedicine software tool was developed using the ELM classifier. The telemedicine tool has performed extraordinary well in detecting the respiratory pathology and it is well validated. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.