A Pipelined Recurrent Fuzzy Neural Filter for the Separation of Lung Sounds

This paper presents a recurrent fuzzy-neural filter that performs the task of separation of lung sounds, obtained from patients with pulmonary pathology. The filter is a pipelined Takagi-Sugeno-Kang recurrent fuzzy network, consisting of a number of modules interconnected in a cascaded form. The participating modules are implemented through recurrent fuzzy neural networks with internal dynamics. The structure of the modules is evolved sequentially from input-output data. Extensive experimental results, regarding the lung sound category of crackles, are given, and a performance comparison with a series of other fuzzy and neural filters is conducted, underlining the separation capabilities of the proposed filter.