Physically Meaningful Surrogate Data for COPD.

The rapidly increasing prevalence of debilitating breathing disorders, such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), calls for a meaningful integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into respiratory healthcare. Deep learning techniques are "data hungry" whilst patient-based data is invariably expensive and time consuming to record. To this end, we introduce a novel COPD-simulator, a physical apparatus with an easy to replicate design which enables rapid and effective generation of a wide range of COPD-like data from healthy subjects, for enhanced training of deep learning frameworks.