A Lightweight CNN Model for Detecting Respiratory Diseases from Lung Auscultation Sounds using EMD-CWT-based Hybrid Scalogram

Abstract: Listening to lung sounds through auscultation is vital in examining the respiratory system for abnormalities. Automated analysis of lung auscultation sounds can be beneficial to the health systems in low-resource settings where there is a lack of skilled physicians. In this work, we propose a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture to classify respiratory diseases using hybrid scalogram-based features of lung sounds. The hybrid scalogram features utilize the empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and continuous wavelet transform (CWT). The proposed scheme's performance is studied using a patient independent train-validation set from the publicly available ICBHI 2017 lung sound dataset. Employing the proposed framework, weighted accuracy scores of 99.20% for ternary chronic classification and 99.05% for six-class pathological classification are achieved, which outperform well-known and much larger VGG16 in terms of accuracy by 0.52% and 1.77% respectively. The proposed CNN model also outperforms other contemporary lightweight models while being computationally comparable.