Respiratory Sound Classification by Applying Deep Neural Network with a Blocking Variable

Abstract

Respiratory diseases are leading causes of death worldwide, and failure to detect diseases at an early stage can threaten people’s lives. Previous research has pointed out that deep learning and machine learning are valid alternative strategies to detect respiratory diseases without the presence of a doctor. Thus, it is worthwhile to develop an automatic respiratory disease detection system. This paper proposes a deep neural network with a blocking variable, namely Blnet, to classify respiratory sound, which integrates the strength of the ResNet, GoogleNet, and the self-attention mechanism. To solve the non-IID data problem, a two-stage training process with the blocking variable was developed. In addition, the mix-up data augmentation within the clusters was used to address the imbalanced data problem. The performance of the Blnet was tested on the ICBHI 2017 data, and the model achieved 79.13% specificity and 66.31% sensitivity, with an average score of 72.72%, which is a 4.22% improvement in the average score and a 12.61% improvement in sensitivity over the state-of-the-art results.