Detection of tuberculosis by automatic cough sound analysis

Globally, tuberculosis (TB) remains one of the most deadly diseases. Although several effective diagnosis methods exist, in lower income countries clinics may not be in a position to afford expensive equipment and employ the trained experts needed to interpret results. In these situations, symptoms including cough are commonly used to identify patients for testing. However, self-reported cough has suboptimal sensitivity and specificity, which may be improved by digital detection.

This study investigates a simple and easily applied method for TB screening based on the automatic analysis of coughing sounds. A database of cough audio recordings was collected and used to develop statistical classifiers.

These classifiers use short-term spectral information to automatically distinguish between the coughs of TB positive patients and healthy controls with an accuracy of 78% and an AUC of 0.95. When a set of five clinical measurements is available in addition to the audio, this accuracy improves to 82%. By choosing an appropriate decision threshold, the system can achieve a sensitivity of 95% at a specificity of approximately 72%. The experiments suggest that the classifiers are using some spectral information that is not perceivable by the human auditory system, and that certain frequencies are more useful for classification than others.

We conclude that automatic classification of coughing sounds may represent a viable low-cost and low-complexity screening method for TB.