We present an experimental investigation into the effectiveness of transfer learning and bottleneck feature extraction in detecting COVID-19 from audio recordings of cough, breath and speech.
This type of screening is non-contact, does not require specialist medical expertise or laboratory facilities and can be deployed on inexpensive consumer hardware.
We use datasets that contain recordings of coughing, sneezing, speech and other noises, but do not contain COVID-19 labels, to pre-train three deep neural networks: a CNN, an LSTM and a Resnet50.
These pre-trained networks are subsequently either fine-tuned using smaller datasets of coughing with COVID-19 labels in the process of transfer learning, or are used as bottleneck feature extractors.
Results show that a Resnet50 classifier trained by this transfer learning process delivers optimal or near-optimal performance across all datasets achieving areas under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC AUC) of 0.98, 0.94 and 0.92 respectively for all three sound classes (coughs, breaths and speech).
This indicates that coughs carry the strongest COVID-19 signature, followed by breath and speech.
Our results also show that applying transfer learning and extracting bottleneck features using the larger datasets without COVID-19 labels led not only to improve performance, but also to minimise the standard deviation of the classifier AUCs among the outer folds of the leave-$p$-out cross-validation, indicating better generalisation.
We conclude that deep transfer learning and bottleneck feature extraction can improve COVID-19 cough, breath and speech audio classification, yielding automatic classifiers with higher accuracy.
We present a deep learning based automatic cough classifier which can discriminate tuberculosis (TB) coughs from COVID-19 coughs and healthy coughs. Both TB and COVID-19 are respiratory diseases, contagious, have cough as a predominant symptom and claim thousands of lives each year. The cough audio recordings were collected at both indoor and outdoor settings and also uploaded using smartphones from subjects around the globe, thus containing various levels of noise. This cough data include 1.68 hours of TB coughs, 18.54 minutes of COVID-19 coughs and 1.69 hours of healthy coughs from 47 TB pat…
University of Oklahoma（俄克拉荷马大学）；AI4Lyf LLC（AI4Lyf有限责任公司）；Kharkiv National Medical University（哈尔科夫国立医科大学）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；Allergy, Asthma & Immunology Center PC（过敏、哮喘与免疫学中心PC）
Background: The inability to test at scale has become humanity's Achille's heel in the ongoing war against the COVID-19 pandemic. A scalable screening tool would be a game changer. Building on the prior work on cough-based diagnosis of respiratory diseases, we propose, develop and test an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered screening solution for COVID-19 infection that is deployable via a smartphone app. The app, named AI4COVID-19 records and sends three 3-second cough sounds to an AI engine running in the cloud, and returns a result within two minutes. Methods: Cough is a symptom of over th…
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 …
COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has led to a treacherous and devastating catastrophe for humanity. At the time of writing, no specific antivirus drugs or vaccines are recommended to control infection transmission and spread. The current diagnosis of COVID-19 is done by Reverse-Transcription Polymer Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) testing. However, this method is expensive, time-consuming, and not easily available in straitened regions. An interpretable and COVID-19 diagnosis AI framework is devised and developed based on the cough sounds features and symptoms metadata…
Testing capacity for COVID-19 remains a challenge globally due to the lack of adequate supplies, trained personnel, and sample-processing equipment. These problems are even more acute in rural and underdeveloped regions. We demonstrate that solicited-cough sounds collected over a phone, when analysed by our AI model, have statistically significant signal indicative of COVID-19 status (AUC 0.72, t-test,p <0.01,95% CI 0.61-0.83). This holds true for asymptomatic patients as well. Towards this, we collect the largest known(to date) dataset of microbiologically confirmed COVID-19 cough sounds from…
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 …
Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）；University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）；North Bristol NHS Trust（北布里斯托尔国民保健服务信托基金）
Our main contributions are as follows: (I) We demonstrate the first attempt to diagnose COVID-19 using end-to-end deep learning from a crowd-sourced dataset of audio samples, achieving ROC-AUC of 0.846; (II) Our model, the COVID-19 Identification ResNet, (CIdeR), has potential for rapid scalability, minimal cost and improving performance as more data becomes available. This could enable regular COVID-19 testing at apopulation scale; (III) We introduce a novel modelling strategy using a custom deep neural network to diagnose COVID-19 from a joint breath and cough representation; (IV) We release…
The COVID-19 pandemic created a significant interest and demand for infection detection and monitoring solutions. In this paper we propose a machine learning method to quickly triage COVID-19 using recordings made on consumer devices. The approach combines signal processing methods with fine-tuned deep learning networks and provides methods for signal denoising, cough detection and classification. We have also developed and deployed a mobile application that uses symptoms checker together with voice, breath and cough signals to detect COVID-19 infection. The application showed robust performan…
This paper addresses issues on cough-based COVID-19 detection. We propose a cross-dataset transfer learning approach to improve the performance of COVID-19 detection by incorporating cough detection, cough segmentation, and data augmentation. The first aimed at removing non-cough signals and cough signals with low probability. The second aimed at segregating several coughs in a waveform into individual coughs. The third aimed at increasing the number of samples for the deep learning model. These three processing blocks are important as our finding revealed a large margin of improvement relativ…
Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence（瓦德瓦尼人工智能研究所）
Rapidly scaling screening, testing and quarantine has shown to be an effective strategy to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. We consider the application of deep learning techniques to distinguish individuals with COVID from non-COVID by using data acquirable from a phone. Using cough and context (symptoms and meta-data) represent such a promising approach. Several independent works in this direction have shown promising results. However, none of them report performance across clinically relevant data splits. Specifically, the performance where the development and test sets are split in time (retro…
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…
The usage of smartphone-collected respiratory sound, trained with deep learning models, for detecting and classifying COVID-19 becomes popular recently. It removes the need for in-person testing procedures especially for rural regions where related medical supplies, experienced workers, and equipment are limited. However, existing sound-based diagnostic approaches are trained in a fully supervised manner, which requires large scale well-labelled data. It is critical to discover new methods to leverage unlabelled respiratory data, which can be obtained more easily. In this paper, we propose a n…
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to put a significant burden on healthcare systems worldwide, there has been growing interest in finding inexpensive symptom pre-screening and recommendation methods to assist in efficiently using available medical resources such as PCR tests. In this study, we introduce the design of COVID-Net Assistant, an efficient virtual assistant designed to provide symptom prediction and recommendations for COVID-19 by analyzing users' cough recordings through deep convolutional neural networks. We explore a variety of highly customized, lightweight convolutional neural…
The issue in respiratory sound classification has attained good attention from the clinical scientists and medical researcher's group in the last year to diagnosing COVID-19 disease. To date, various models of Artificial Intelligence (AI) entered into the real-world to detect the COVID-19 disease from human-generated sounds such as voice/speech, cough, and breath. The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model is implemented for solving a lot of real-world problems on machines based on Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this context, one dimension (1D) CNN is suggested and implemented to diagnose …
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…
The present work proposes a deep-learning-based approach for the classification of COVID-19 coughs from non-COVID-19 coughs and that can be used as a low-resource-based tool for early detection of the onset of such respiratory diseases. The proposed system uses the ResNet-50 architecture, a popularly known Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) for image recognition tasks, fed with the log-Mel spectrums of the audio data to discriminate between the two types of coughs. For the training and validation of the proposed deep learning model, this work utilizes the Track-1 dataset provided by the DiCOVA…
COVID-19 has resulted in over 100 million infections and caused worldwide lock downs due to its high transmission rate and limited testing options. Current diagnostic tests can be expensive, limited in availability, time-intensive and require risky in-person appointments. It has been established that symptomatic COVID-19 seriously impairs normal functioning of the respiratory system, thus affecting the coughing acoustics. The 2021 DiCOVA Challenge @ INTERSPEECH was designed to find scientific and engineering insights to the question by enabling participants to analyze an acoustic dataset gathe…
We seek to evaluate the detection performance of a rapid primary screening tool of Covid-19 solely based on the cough sound from 8,380 clinically validated samples with laboratory molecular-test (2,339 Covid-19 positives and 6,041 Covid-19 negatives). Samples were clinically labeled according to the results and severity based on quantitative RT-PCR (qRT-PCR) analysis, cycle threshold, and lymphocytes count from the patients. Our proposed generic method is an algorithm based on Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) with subsequent classification based on a tensor of audio features and a deep artif…
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 …
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）；FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg（埃尔朗根-纽伦堡大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）；Utrecht University（乌得勒支大学）
The INTERSPEECH 2021 Computational Paralinguistics Challenge addresses four different problems for the first time in a research competition under well-defined conditions: In the COVID-19 Cough and COVID-19 Speech Sub-Challenges, a binary classification on COVID-19 infection has to be made based on coughing sounds and speech; in the Escalation SubChallenge, a three-way assessment of the level of escalation in a dialogue is featured; and in the Primates Sub-Challenge, four species vs background need to be classified. We describe the Sub-Challenges, baseline feature extraction, and classifiers ba…
In this study, we proposed a machine learning-based system to distinguish patients with COVID-19 from non-COVID-19 patients by analyzing only a single cough sound. Two different data sets were used, one accessible for the public and the other available on request. After combining the data sets, the features were obtained from the cough sounds using the mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) method, and then they were classified with seven different machine learning classifiers. To determine the optimum values of hyperparameters for MFCCs and classifiers, the leave-one-out cross-validation…
Virufy AI Research Group（Virufy AI研究组）；University of Alexandria（亚历山大大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Duke University（杜克大学）
Rapid and affordable methods of testing for COVID-19 infections are essential to reduce infection rates and prevent medical facilities from becoming overwhelmed. Current approaches of detecting COVID-19 require in-person testing with expensive kits that are not always easily accessible. This study demonstrates that crowdsourced cough audio samples recorded and acquired on smartphones from around the world can be used to develop an AI-based method that accurately predicts COVID-19 infection with an ROC-AUC of 77.1% (75.2%-78.3%). Furthermore, we show that our method is able to generalize to cro…
Cough audio signal classification has been successfully used to diagnose a variety of respiratory conditions, and there has been significant interest in leveraging Machine Learning (ML) to provide widespread COVID-19 screening. However, there is currently no validated database of cough sounds with which to train such ML models. The COUGHVID dataset provides over 20,000 crowdsourced cough recordings representing a wide range of subject ages, genders, geographic locations, and COVID-19 statuses. First, we filtered the dataset using our open-sourced cough detection algorithm. Second, experienced …
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…
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 respira…
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…
Virufy；University of South Dakota（南达科他大学）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Duke University（杜克大学）；University of California San Francisco（加州大学旧金山分校）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；University of California, Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）；University of California Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
The Covid-19 pandemic has been one of the most devastating events in recent history, claiming the lives of more than 5 million people worldwide. Even with the worldwide distribution of vaccines, there is an apparent need for affordable, reliable, and accessible screening techniques to serve parts of the World that do not have access to Western medicine. Artificial Intelligence can provide a solution utilizing cough sounds as a primary screening mode for COVID-19 diagnosis. This paper presents multiple models that have achieved relatively respectable performance on the largest evaluation datase…
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…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学）；Instituto de Salud Carlos III（卡洛斯三世卫生研究所）；Hospital Universitari Germans Trias i Pujol（Germans Trias i Pujol大学医院）；Universidad de Guadalajara（瓜达拉哈拉大学）；Centro Universitario de Ciencias de la Salud（健康科学中心大学学院）；OPD Hospital Civil de Guadalajara（瓜达拉哈拉市立医院）
Just like your phone can detect what song is playing in crowded spaces, we show that Artificial Intelligence transfer learning algorithms trained on cough phone recordings results in diagnostic tests for COVID-19. To gain adoption by the health care community, we plan to validate our results in a clinical trial and three other venues in Mexico, Spain and the USA . However, if we had data from other on-going clinical trials and volunteers, we may do much more. For example, for confirmed stay-at-home COVID-19 patients, a longitudinal audio test could be developed to determine contact-with-hospit…
Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学苏瑞福公共卫生学院）；National University Health System, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学国立大学医疗系统）；National University Hospital, Singapore（新加坡国立大学医院）；Yong Loo Lin Medical School, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学杨潞龄医学院）；Institute of Data Science, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学数据科学研究所）
We suggested a unified system with core components of data augmentation, ImageNet-pretrained ResNet-50, cost-sensitive loss, deep ensemble learning, and uncertainty estimation to quickly and consistently detect COVID-19 using acoustic evidence. To increase the model's capacity to identify a minority class, data augmentation and cost-sensitive loss are incorporated (infected samples). In the COVID-19 detection challenge, ImageNet-pretrained ResNet-50 has been found to be effective. The unified framework also integrates deep ensemble learning and uncertainty estimation to integrate predictions f…
FPT Software Company Limited（FPT软件有限公司）；Austrian Institute of Technology（奥地利技术研究所）；University of Essex（埃塞克斯大学）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）
This paper presents a deep learning framework for detecting COVID-19 positive subjects from their cough sounds. In particular, the proposed approach comprises two main steps. In the first step, we generate a feature representing the cough sound by combining an embedding extracted from a pre-trained model and handcrafted features extracted from draw audio recording, referred to as the front-end feature extraction. Then, the combined features are fed into different back-end classification models for detecting COVID-19 positive subjects in the second step. Our experiments on the Track-2 dataset o…
Secretaría de Innovavión y Transformación Digital（创新与数字化转型秘书处）；Subsecretaría de Planificación Sanitaria（卫生规划副秘书处）；Ministerio de Salud（卫生部）
OBJECTIVE: Our objective is to evaluate the possibility of using cough audio recordings (spontaneous or simulated) to detect sound patterns in people who are diagnosed with COVID-19. The research question that led our work was: what is the sensitivity and specificity of a machine learning based COVID-19 cough classifier, using RT-PCR tests as gold standard? SETTING: The audio samples that were collected for this study belong to individuals who were swabbed in the City of Buenos Aires in 20 public and 1 private facilities where RT-PCR studies were carried out on patients suspected of COVID, and…
EURECOM；University of Granada（格拉纳达大学）；Biometric Vox S.L.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the saturation of public health services worldwide. In this scenario, the early diagnosis of SARS-Cov-2 infections can help to stop or slow the spread of the virus and to manage the demand upon health services. This is especially important when resources are also being stretched by heightened demand linked to other seasonal diseases, such as the flu. In this context, the organisers of the DiCOVA 2021 challenge have collected a database with the aim of diagnosing COVID-19 through the use of coughing audio samples. This work presents the details of the automatic …
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…
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.
Ping An Technology (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.（平安科技（深圳）有限公司）
In this paper, we propose a real-time robot-based auxiliary system for risk evaluation of COVID-19 infection. It combines real-time speech recognition, temperature measurement, keyword detection, cough detection and other functions in order to convert live audio into actionable structured data to achieve the COVID-19 infection risk assessment function. In order to better evaluate the COVID-19 infection, we propose an end-to-end method for cough detection and classification for our proposed system. It is based on real conversation data from human-robot, which processes speech signals to detect …
University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）；Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；Joint Research Centre, European Commission（欧盟委员会联合研究中心）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）
This paper aims to automatically detect COVID-19 patients by analysing the acoustic information embedded in coughs. COVID-19 affects the respiratory system, and, consequently, respiratory-related signals have the potential to contain salient information for the task at hand. We focus on analysing the spectrogram representations of coughing samples with the aim to investigate whether COVID-19 alters the frequency content of these signals. Furthermore, this work also assesses the impact of gender in the automatic detection of COVID-19. To extract deep learnt representations of the spectrograms, …
University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）；Imperial College London（伦敦帝国理工学院）
Aiming to automatically detect COVID-19 from cough sounds, we propose a deep attentive multi-model fusion system evaluated on the Track-1 dataset of the DiCOVA 2021 challenge. Three kinds of representations are extracted, including hand-crafted features, image-from-audio-based deep representations, and audio-based deep representations. Afterwards, the best models on the three types of features are fused at both the feature level and the decision level. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed attention-based fusion at the feature level achieves the best performance (AUC: 77.96%) …
Samsung Research and Development Institute Bangalore（三星班加罗尔研发院）
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in more than 125 million infections and more than 2.7 million casualties. In this paper, we attempt to classify covid vs non-covid cough sounds using signal processing and deep learning methods. Air turbulence, the vibration of tissues, movement of fluid through airways, opening, and closure of glottis are some of the causes for the production of the acoustic sound signals during cough. Does the COVID-19 alter the acoustic characteristics of breath, cough, and speech sounds produced through the respiratory system? This is an open question waiting for answers.…
COVID-19 Diagnosis from Cough Acoustics using ConvNets and Data Augmentation
Electronics and Communication Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology, Silchar, India 788010（电子与通信工程系，印度尼特理工学院，西尔CHAR，印度788010）；Computer Science and Engineering Department, National Institute of Technology,Silchar, India 788010（计算机科学与工程系，印度尼特理工学院，西尔CHAR，印度788010）；Software Engineering Department, Paytm, Noida, India 110096（软件工程系，Paytm，印度诺伊达，印度110096）；Mathematics in Computer Science, University of Science of HCMC, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 700000（计算机科学中的数学，河内科学大学，胡志明市，越南700000）
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…
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…
Cough is one of the most common symptoms in all respiratory diseases. In cases like Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, Asthma, acute and chronic Bronchitis and the recent pandemic Covid-19, the early identification of cough is important to provide healthcare professionals with useful clinical information such as frequency, severity, and nature of cough to enable better diagnosis. This paper presents and demonstrates best feature selection using MFCC which can help to determine cough events, eventually helping a neural network to learn and improve accuracy of cough detection. The paper prop…
University of Augsburg（奥格斯堡大学）；Johannes Kepler University Linz（约翰内斯·开普勒林茨大学）；Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）
Detecting COVID-19 from audio signals, such as breathing and coughing, can be used as a fast and efficient pre-testing method to reduce the virus transmission. Due to the promising results of deep learning networks in modelling time sequences, and since applications to rapidly identify COVID in-the-wild should require low computational effort, we present a temporal-oriented broadcasting residual learning method that achieves efficient computation and high accuracy with a small model size. Based on the EfficientNet architecture, our novel network, named Temporal-oriented ResNet~(TorNet), consti…
Towards reliable respiratory disease diagnosis based on cough sounds and vision transformers
Luca Healthcare（卢卡医疗）；Ruijin Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine（上海交通大学医学院附属瑞金医院）；Shanghai Key Laboratory of Emergency Prevention, Diagnosis and Treatment of Respiratory Infectious Disease（上海市呼吸道传染病应急防控诊治重点实验室）
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 …
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…
