ILD-VIT: A Unified Vision Transformer Architecture for Detection of Interstitial Lung Disease from Respiratory Sounds

Interstitial lung disease (ILD) represents a group of restrictive chronic pulmonary diseases that impair oxygen acquisition by causing irreversible changes in the lungs such as fibrosis, scarring of parenchyma, etc. ILD conditions are often diagnosed by various clinical modalities such as spirometry, high-resolution lung imaging techniques, crackling respiratory sounds (RSs), etc. In this letter, we develop a novel vision transformer (VIT)-based deep learning framework namely, ILD-VIT, to detect the ILD condition using the RS recordings. The proposed framework comprises three major stages: pre-processing, mel spectrogram extraction, and classification using the proposed VIT architecture using the mel spectrogram image patches. Experimental results using the publicly available BRACETS and KAUH databases show that our proposed ILD-VIT achieves an accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of 84.86%, 82.67%, and 86.91%, respectively, for subject-independent blind testing. The successful onboard implantation of the proposed framework on a Raspberry-pi-4 microcontroller indicates its potential as a standalone clinical system for ILD screening in a real clinical scenario.