Respiratory Anomaly and Disease Detection Using Multi-Level Temporal Convolutional Networks

An automated analysis of respiratory sounds using Deep Learning (DL) plays a pivotal role in the early detection of lung diseases. However, current DL methods often examine the spatial and temporal characteristics of respiratory sounds in isolation, which inherently limit their potential. This study proposes a novel DL framework that captures spatial features through convolution operations and exploits the spatiotemporal correlations of these features using temporal convolution networks. The proposed framework incorporates Multi-Level Temporal Convolutional Networks (ML-TCN) to considerably enhance the model accuracy in detecting anomaly breathing cycles and respiratory recordings from lung sound audio. Moreover, a transfer learning technique is also employed to extract semantic features efficiently from limited and imbalanced data in this domain. Thorough experiments on the well-known ICBHI 2017 challenge dataset show that the proposed framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both binary and multi-class classification tasks for respiratory anomaly and disease detection. In particular, improvements of up to 2.29% and 2.27% in terms of the Score metric, average sensitivity and specificity, are demonstrated in binary and multi-class anomaly breathing cycle detection tasks, respectively. In respiratory recording classification tasks, the classification accuracy is improved by 2.69% for healthy-unhealthy binary classification and 1.47% for healthy, chronic, and non-chronic diagnosis. These results highlight the marked advantage of the ML-TCN over existing techniques, showcasing its potential to drive future innovations in respiratory healthcare technology.