Automated cough sound analysis for detecting childhood pneumonia

Pneumonia is one of the leading causes of death in children. Prompt diagnosis and treatment can help prevent these deaths, particularly in resource poor regions where deaths due to pneumonia are highest. Clinical symptom-based screening of childhood pneumonia yields excessive false positives, highlighting the necessity for additional rapid diagnostic tests. Cough is a prevalent symptom of acute respiratory illnesses and the sound of a cough can indicate the underlying pathological changes resulting from respiratory infections. In this study, we propose a fully automated approach to evaluate cough sounds to distinguish pneumonia from other acute respiratory diseases in children. The proposed method involves cough sound denoising, cough sound segmentation, and cough sound classification. The denoising algorithm utilizes multi-conditional spectral mapping with a multilayer perceptron network while the segmentation algorithm detects cough sounds directly from the denoised audio waveform. From the segmented cough signal, we extract various handcrafted features and feature embeddings from a pretrained deep learning network. A multilayer perceptron is trained on the combined feature set for detecting pneumonia. The method we propose is evaluated using a dataset comprising cough sounds from 173 children diagnosed with either pneumonia or other acute respiratory diseases. On average, the denoising algorithm improved the signal-to-noise ratio by 44%. Furthermore, a sensitivity and specificity of 91% and 86%, respectively, is achieved in cough segmentation and 82% and 71%, respectively, in detecting childhood pneumonia using cough sounds alone. This demonstrates its potential as a rapid diagnostic tool, such as using smartphone technology.