Deep Learning on Computerized Analysis of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is one of the deadliest diseases in the world. Because COPD is an incurable disease and requires considerable time to be diagnosed even by an experienced specialist, it becomes important to provide analysis abnormalities in simple ways. The aim of the study is comparing multiple machine learning algorithms for the early diagnosis of COPD using multi-channel lung sounds.

Deep learning is an efficient machine-learning algorithm, which comprises unsupervised training to reduce optimization and supervised training by a feature-based distribution of classification parameters. This study focuses on analyzing multichannel lung sounds using statistical features of frequency modulations that are extracted using the Hilbert-Huang transform.

Deep learning algorithm was used in the classification stage of the proposed model to separate the patients with COPD and healthy subjects. The proposed DL model with the Hilbert-Huang transform based statistical features was successful in achieving high classification performance rates of 93.67%, 91%, and 96.33% for accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity, respectively.

The proposed computerized analysis of the multi-channel lung sounds using DL algorithms provides a standardized assessment with high classification performance.

Our study is a pioneer study that directly focuses on the lung sounds to separate COPD and non-COPD patients. Analyzing 12-channel lung sounds gives the advantages of assessing the entire lung obstructions.