Machine learning-driven strategies for enhanced pediatric wheezing detection.

Background: Auscultation is a critical diagnostic feature of lung diseases, but it is subjective and challenging to measure accurately. To overcome these limitations, artificial intelligence models have been developed.

Methods: In this prospective study, we aimed to compare respiratory sound feature extraction methods to develop an optimal machine learning model for detecting wheezing in children. Pediatric pulmonologists recorded and verified 103 instances of wheezing and 184 other respiratory sounds in 76 children. Various methods were used for sound feature extraction, and dimensions were reduced using t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE). The performance of models in wheezing detection was evaluated using a kernel support vector machine (SVM).

Results: The duration of recordings in the wheezing and non-wheezing groups were 89.36 ± 39.51 ms and 63.09 ± 27.79 ms, respectively. The Mel-spectrogram, Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC), and spectral contrast achieved the best expression of respiratory sounds and showed good performance in cluster classification. The SVM model using spectral contrast exhibited the best performance, with an accuracy, precision, recall, and F-1 score of 0.897, 0.800, 0.952, and 0.869, respectively.

Conclusion: Mel-spectrograms, MFCC, and spectral contrast are effective for characterizing respiratory sounds in children. A machine learning model using spectral contrast demonstrated high detection performance, indicating its potential utility in ensuring accurate diagnosis of pediatric respiratory diseases.