Computerized respiratory sound based diagnosis of pneumonia

Globally, respiratory disorders are a great health burden, affecting as well as destroying human lives; pneumonia is one among them. Pneumonia stages can progress from mild stage to even towards deadly if it is misdiagnosed. Misdiagnosis happens as it exhibits the symptoms identical to other respiratory diseases. Respiratory sound (RS)-based detection of pneumonia could be the most perfect, convenient, as well as the economical solution to this serious problem. This paper presents a novel method to detect pneumonia based on RS. This study is carried out over 310 pneumonia RS and 318 healthy RS, recorded from a hospital. The noises from each RS are eliminated using the Butterworth band pass filter and sparsity-assisted signal smoothing algorithm. Approximate entropy, Shannon entropy, fractal dimension, and largest Lyapunov exponent are the nonlinear features, which are extracted from each denoised RS. The extracted features are inputted to support vector machine classifiers to distinguish pneumonia RS and healthy RS. This method discriminates against pneumonia and healthy RS with 99.8% classification accuracy, 99.8% sensitivity, 99.6% specificity, 99.6% positive predictive value, 99.6% F1-score, and area under curve value of 1.0. Future endeavours will be to examine the efficacy of the proposed algorithm to diagnose pneumonia from the real-time RS acquired from a pneumonia patient in a hospital. This proposed work could be a great support to clinicians in diagnosing pneumonia based on RS.