The COVID-19 pandemic presents global challenges transcending boundaries of country, race, religion, and economy. The current gold standard method for COVID-19 detection is the reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) testing. However, this method is expensive, time-consuming, and violates social distancing. Also, as the pandemic is expected to stay for a while, there is a need for an alternate diagnosis tool which overcomes these limitations, and is deployable at a large scale. The prominent symptoms of COVID-19 include cough and breathing difficulties. We foresee that respiratory sounds, when analyzed using machine learning techniques, can provide useful insights, enabling the design of a diagnostic tool. Towards this, the paper presents an early effort in creating (and analyzing) a database, called Coswara, of respiratory sounds, namely, cough, breath, and voice. The sound samples are collected via worldwide crowdsourcing using a website application. The curated dataset is released as open access. As the pandemic is evolving, the data collection and analysis is a work in progress. We believe that insights from analysis of Coswara can be effective in enabling sound based technology solutions for point-of-care diagnosis of respiratory infection, and in the near future this can help to diagnose COVID-19.
University of Chittagong（吉大港大学）；Charles Sturt University（查尔斯特大学）
The objectives of this research are analysing the performance of the state-of-the-art machine learning techniques for classifying COVID-19 from cough sound and identifying the model(s) that consistently perform well across different cough datasets. Different performance evaluation metrics (such as precision, sensitivity, specificity, AUC, accuracy, etc.) make it difficult to select the best performance model. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose an ensemble-based multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method for selecting top performance machine learning technique(s) for COVID-19 co…
Coswara: A respiratory sounds and symptoms dataset for remote screening of SARS-CoV-2 infection
Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）；Fraunhofer Institute of Integrated Circuits（弗劳恩霍夫集成电路研究所）；Ramaiah Medical College Hospital（拉马亚医学院医院）；General Hospital, Hoskote（霍斯科特综合医院）；PSG Institute of Medical Sciences and Research（PSG医学科学与研究学院）
The technology development for point-of-care tests (POCTs) targeting respiratory diseases has witnessed a growing demand in the recent past. Investigating the presence of acoustic biomarkers in modalities such as cough, breathing and speech sounds, and using them for building POCTs can offer fast, contactless and inexpensive testing. In view of this, over the past year, we launched the ``Coswara'' project to collect cough, breathing and speech sound recordings via worldwide crowdsourcing. With this data, a call for development of diagnostic tools was announced in the Interspeech 2021 as a spec…
Sound-Dr: Reliable Sound Dataset and Baseline Artificial Intelligence System for Respiratory Illnesses
AI Center, FPT Software Company Limited（FPT软件公司人工智能中心）；Reliable Machine Learning Group（可靠机器学习小组）；School of Computer Science and Information Technology, University College Cork, Ireland（University College Cork信息科学与技术学院）
University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected the world unevenly; while industrial economies have been able to produce the tests necessary to track the spread of the virus and mostly avoided complete lockdowns, developing countries have faced issues with testing capacity. In this paper, we explore the usage of deep learning models as a ubiquitous, low-cost, pre-testing method for detecting COVID-19 from audio recordings of breathing or coughing taken with mobile devices or via the web. We adapt an ensemble of Convolutional Neural Networks that utilise raw breathing and coughing audio and spectrograms to …
The Second Diagnosis of COVID-19 using Acoustics (DiCOVA) Challenge aimed at accelerating the research in acoustics based detection of COVID-19, a topic at the intersection of acoustics, signal processing, machine learning, and healthcare. This paper presents the details of the challenge, which was an open call for researchers to analyze a dataset of audio recordings consisting of breathing, cough and speech signals. This data was collected from individuals with and without COVID-19 infection, and the task in the challenge was a two-class classification. The development set audio recordings we…
Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）；Ramaiah Medical College Hospital（拉马亚医学院医院）；General Hospital, Hoskote（霍斯考特综合医院）；PSG Institute of Medical Sciences and Research（PSG医学科学与研究院）
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated research on design of alternative, quick and effective COVID-19 diagnosis approaches. In this paper, we describe the Coswara tool, a website application designed to enable COVID-19 detection by analysing respiratory sound samples and health symptoms. A user using this service can log into a website using any device connected to the internet, provide there current health symptom information and record few sound sampled corresponding to breathing, cough, and speech. Within a minute of analysis of this information on a cloud server the website tool will outpu…
In the break of COVID-19 pandemic, mass testing has become essential to reduce the spread of the virus. Several recent studies suggest that a significant number of COVID-19 patients display no physical symptoms whatsoever. Therefore, it is unlikely that these patients will undergo COVID-19 test, which increases their chances of unintentionally spreading the virus. Currently, the primary diagnostic tool to detect COVID-19 is RT-PCR test on collected respiratory specimens from the suspected case. This requires patients to travel to a laboratory facility to be tested, thereby potentially infectin…
University of Science and Technology of China (USTC)（中国科学技术大学）；Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院声学研究所）
In this work, we propose a bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) network based COVID-19 detection method using breath/speech/cough signals. By using the acoustic signals to train the network, respectively, we can build individual models for three tasks, whose parameters are averaged to obtain an average model, which is then used as the initialization for the BiLSTM model training of each task. This initialization method can significantly improve the performance on the three tasks, which surpasses the official baseline results. Besides, we also utilize a public pre-trained model wav2ve…
We present a machine learning based COVID-19 cough classifier which can discriminate COVID-19 positive coughs from both COVID-19 negative and healthy coughs recorded on a smartphone. This type of screening is non-contact, easy to apply, and can reduce the workload in testing centres as well as limit transmission by recommending early self-isolation to those who have a cough suggestive of COVID-19. The datasets used in this study include subjects from all six continents and contain both forced and natural coughs, indicating that the approach is widely applicable. The publicly available Coswara …
Verisk Analytics Inc.（维睿斯克分析公司）；Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）
This report describes the system used for detecting COVID-19 positives using three different acoustic modalities, namely speech, breathing, and cough in the second DiCOVA challenge. The proposed system is based on the combination of 4 different approaches, each focusing more on one aspect of the problem, and reaches the blind test AUCs of 86.41, 77.60, and 84.55, in the breathing, cough, and speech tracks, respectively, and the AUC of 85.37 in the fusion of these three tracks.
In this paper, we describe an approach for representation learning of audio signals for the task of COVID-19 detection. The raw audio samples are processed with a bank of 1-D convolutional filters that are parameterized as cosine modulated Gaussian functions. The choice of these kernels allows the interpretation of the filterbanks as smooth band-pass filters. The filtered outputs are pooled, log-compressed and used in a self-attention based relevance weighting mechanism. The relevance weighting emphasizes the key regions of the time-frequency decomposition that are important for the downstream…
Fine-tuning Pre-trained Audio Models for COVID-19 Detection: A Technical Report
Institute of Biosciences, Languages, and Exact Sciences（生物科学、语言和精确科学学院）；São Paulo State University（圣保罗州大学）；Institute of Natural Sciences and Engineering（自然科学与工程学院）；University of São Paulo（圣保罗大学）；Institute of Mathematics and Statistics（数学与统计学院）
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
Audio signals generated by the human body (e.g., sighs, breathing, heart, digestion, vibration sounds) have routinely been used by clinicians as indicators to diagnose disease or assess disease progression. Until recently, such signals were usually collected through manual auscultation at scheduled visits. Research has now started to use digital technology to gather bodily sounds (e.g., from digital stethoscopes) for cardiovascular or respiratory examination, which could then be used for automatic analysis. Some initial work shows promise in detecting diagnostic signals of COVID-19 from voice …
Zonguldak Bülent Ecevit University（宗古尔达克·比伦特·埃杰维特大学）；Eregli Iron and Steel Co.（埃雷利钢铁公司）
The disease called the new coronavirus (COVID19) is a new viral respiratory disease that first appeared on January 13, 2020 in Wuhan, China. Some of the symptoms of this disease are fever, cough, shortness of breath and difficulty in breathing. In more serious cases, death may occur as a result of infection. COVID19 emerged as a pandemic that affected the whole world in a little while. The most important issue in the fight against the epidemic is the early diagnosis and follow-up of COVID19 (+) patients. Therefore, in addition to the RT-PCR test, medical imaging methods are also used when iden…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Southampton（南安普顿大学）
Recent work has shown the potential of using audio data (eg, cough, breathing, and voice) in the screening for COVID-19. However, these approaches only focus on one-off detection and detect the infection given the current audio sample, but do not monitor disease progression in COVID-19. Limited exploration has been put forward to continuously monitor COVID-19 progression, especially recovery, through longitudinal audio data. Tracking disease progression characteristics could lead to more timely treatment. The primary objective of this study is to explore the potential of longitudinal audio sam…
The current outbreak of a coronavirus, has quickly escalated to become a serious global problem that has now been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern by the World Health Organization. Infectious diseases know no borders, so when it comes to controlling outbreaks, timing is absolutely essential. It is so important to detect threats as early as possible, before they spread. After a first successful DiCOVA challenge, the organisers released second DiCOVA challenge with the aim of diagnosing COVID-19 through the use of breath, cough and speech audio samples. This work prese…
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；North Bristol NHS Trust（北布里斯托尔国民健康服务体系信托基金）；University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）
We report on cross-running the recent COVID-19 Identification ResNet (CIdeR) on the two Interspeech 2021 COVID-19 diagnosis from cough and speech audio challenges: ComParE and DiCOVA. CIdeR is an end-to-end deep learning neural network originally designed to classify whether an individual is COVID-positive or COVID-negative based on coughing and breathing audio recordings from a published crowdsourced dataset. In the current study, we demonstrate the potential of CIdeR at binary COVID-19 diagnosis from both the COVID-19 Cough and Speech Sub-Challenges of INTERSPEECH 2021, ComParE and DiCOVA. C…
University of Brighton（布莱顿大学）；Royal Holloway University of London（伦敦大学皇家霍洛威学院）
Audio classification using breath and cough samples has recently emerged as a low-cost, non-invasive, and accessible COVID-19 screening method. However, a comprehensive survey shows that no application has been approved for official use at the time of writing, due to the stringent reliability and accuracy requirements of the critical healthcare setting. To support the development of Machine Learning classification models, we performed an extensive comparative investigation and ranking of 15 audio features, including less well-known ones. The results were verified on two independent COVID-19 so…
University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Southampton（南安普顿大学）
Researchers have been battling with the question of how we can identify Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases efficiently, affordably and at scale. Recent work has shown how audio based approaches, which collect respiratory audio data (cough, breathing and voice) can be used for testing, however there is a lack of exploration of how biases and methodological decisions impact these tools' performance in practice. In this paper, we explore the realistic performance of audio-based digital testing of COVID-19. To investigate this, we collected a large crowdsourced respiratory audio dataset through …
The World Health Organization (WHO) has announced a COVID-19 was a global pandemic in March 2020. It was initially started in china in the year 2019 December and affected an expanding number of nations in various countries in the last few months. In this particular situation, many techniques, methods, and AI-based classification algorithms are put in the spotlight in reacting to fight against it and reduce the rate of such a global health crisis. COVID-19's main signs are heavy temperature, different cough, cold, breathing shortness, and a combination of loss of sense of smell and chest tightn…
UAEU（阿拉伯联合酋长国大学）；Staffordshire University（斯塔福德郡大学）；Tianjin University of Technology（天津理工大学）
Respiratory symptoms can be a caused by different underlying conditions, and are often caused by viral infections, such as Influenza-like illnesses or other emerging viruses like the Coronavirus. These respiratory viruses, often, have common symptoms, including coughing, high temperature, congested nose, and difficulty breathing. However, early diagnosis of the type of the virus, can be crucial, especially in cases such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic. One of the factors that contributed to the spread of the pandemic, was the late diagnosis or confusing it with regular flu-like symptoms. Scien…
Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）；Ramaiah Medical College Hospital（拉马亚医学院医院）；General Hospital, Hoskote（霍斯考特综合医院）；PSG Institute of Medical Sciences and Research（PSG医学科学与研究学院）
The COVID-19 outbreak resulted in multiple waves of infections that have been associated with different SARS-CoV-2 variants. Studies have reported differential impact of the variants on respiratory health of patients. We explore whether acoustic signals, collected from COVID-19 subjects, show computationally distinguishable acoustic patterns suggesting a possibility to predict the underlying virus variant. We analyze the Coswara dataset which is collected from three subject pools, namely, i) healthy, ii) COVID-19 subjects recorded during the delta variant dominant period, and iii) data from CO…
Recently there has been a formidable work which has been put up from the people who are working in the frontlines such as hospitals, clinics, and labs alongside researchers and scientists who are also putting tremendous efforts in the fight against COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the preposterous spread of the virus, the integration of the artificial intelligence has taken a considerable part in the health sector, by implementing the fundamentals of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and deep learning algorithms. In this paper, we illustrate the importance of speech signal processing in the extracti…
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国学院）；University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）；audEERING GmbH（audEERING有限公司）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
At the time of writing, the world population is suffering from more than 10,000 registered COVID-19 disease epidemic induced deaths since the outbreak of the Corona virus more than three months ago now officially known as SARS-CoV-2. Since, tremendous efforts have been made worldwide to counter-steer and control the epidemic by now labelled as pandemic. In this contribution, we provide an overview on the potential for computer audition (CA), i.e., the usage of speech and sound analysis by artificial intelligence to help in this scenario. We first survey which types of related or contextually s…
