Comprehensive Analysis System for Automated Respiratory Cycle Segmentation and Crackle Peak Detection

Digital auscultation is a well-known method for assessing lung sounds, but remains a subjective process in typical practice, relying on the human interpretation. Several methods have been presented for detecting or analyzing crackles but are limited in their real-world application because few have been integrated into comprehensive systems or validated on non-ideal data. This work details a complete signal analysis methodology for analyzing crackles in challenging recordings. The procedure comprises five sequential processing blocks: (1) motion artifact detection, (2) deep learning denoising network, (3) respiratory cycle segmentation, (4) separation of discontinuous adventitious sounds from vesicular sounds, and (5) crackle peak detection. This system uses a collection of new methods and robustness-focused improvements on previous methods to analyze respiratory cycles and crackles therein. To validate the accuracy, the system is tested on a database of 1000 simulated lung sounds with varying levels of motion artifacts, ambient noise, cycle lengths and crackle intensities, in which ground truths are exactly known. The system performs with average F-score of 91.07% for detecting motion artifacts and 94.43% for respiratory cycle extraction, and an overall F-score of 94.08% for detecting the locations of individual crackles. The process also successfully detects healthy recordings. Preliminary validation is also presented on a small set of 20 patient recordings, for which the system performs comparably. These methods provide quantifiable analysis of respiratory sounds to enable clinicians to distinguish between types of crackles, their timing within the respiratory cycle, and the level of occurrence. Crackles are one of the most common abnormal lung sounds, presenting in multiple cardiorespiratory diseases. These features will contribute to a better understanding of disease severity and progression in an objective, simple and non-invasive way.

Automated summary

This study presents a comprehensive signal analysis method for analyzing challenging recordings of crackles, which performs well and exhibits high accuracy in crackle detection. By utilizing a combination of new methods and robustness-focused improvements, the system can assist clinicians in better understanding respiratory sounds non-invasively to differentiate between different types of crackles.