Crackle and Breathing Phase Detection in Lung Sounds with Deep Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Neural Networks

In this paper, we present a method for event detection in single-channel lung sound recordings. This includes the detection of crackles and breathing phase events (inspiration/expiration). Therefore, we propose an event detection approach with spectral features and bidirectional gated recurrent neural networks (BiGRNNs). In our experiments, we use multichannel lung sound recordings from lung-healthy subjects and patients diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, collected within a clinical trial. We achieve an event-based F-score of F₁ ≈ 86% for breathing phase events and F₁ ≈ 72% for crackles. The proposed method shows robustness regarding the contamination of the lung sound recordings with noise, bowel and heart sounds.