Paper Info
Title
Coughgan: Generating Synthetic Coughs That Improve Respiratory Disease Classification
Abstract
Despite the prevalence of respiratory diseases, their diagnosis by clinicians is challenging. Accurately assessing airway sounds requires extensive clinical training and equipment that may not be easily available. Current methods that automate this diagnosis are hindered by their use of features that require pulmonary function tests. We leverage the audio characteristics of coughs to create classifiers that can distinguish common respiratory diseases in adults. Moreover, we build on recent advances in generative adversarial networks to augment our dataset with cleverly engineered synthetic cough samples for each class of major respiratory disease, to balance and increase our dataset size. We experimented on cough samples collected with a smartphone from 45 subjects in a clinic. Our CoughGAN-improved Support Vector Machine and Random Forest models show up to 76% test accuracy and 83% F1 score in classifying subjects' conditions between healthy and three major respiratory diseases. Adding our synthetic coughs improves the performance we can obtain from a relatively small unbalanced healthcare dataset by boosting the accuracy over 30%. Our data augmentation reduces overfitting and discourages the prediction of a single, dominant class. These results highlight the feasibility of automatic, cough-based respiratory disease diagnosis using smartphones or wearables in the wild.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/EMBC44109.2020.9175597
42ND ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCES OF THE IEEE ENGINEERING IN MEDICINE AND BIOLOGY SOCIETY: ENABLING INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGIES FOR GLOBAL HEALTHCARE EMBC'20
DocType
Volume
ISSN
Conference
2020
1557-170X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Vishwajith Ramesh100.68
Korosh Vatanparvar213416.20
Ebrahim Nemati38415.30
Viswam Nathan45014.09
Md. Mahmudur Rahman51716.00
Jilong Kuang63817.00