Identification of pulmonary diseases comprises of accurate auscultation as well as elaborate and expensive pulmonary function tests. Prior arts have shown that pulmonary diseases lead to abnormal lung sounds such as wheezes and crackles. This paper introduces novel spectral and spectrogram features, which are further refined by Maximal Information Coefficient, leading to the classification of healthy and abnormal lung sounds. A balanced lung sound dataset, consisting of publicly available data and data collected with a low-cost in-house digital stethoscope are used. The performance of the classifier is validated over several randomly selected non-overlapping training and validation samples and tested on separate subjects for two separate test cases: (a) overlapping and (b) non-overlapping data sources in training and testing. The results reveal that the proposed method sustains an accuracy of 80% even for non-overlapping data sources in training and testing.
Catathrenia is an uncommon sleep disorder. Having been originally classified as a parasomnia it is now considered a sleep related breathing disorder. Polysomnography (PSG) is the gold standard for diagnosing catathrenia which demonstrates a classic pattern of a deep inhalation followed by a protracted exhalation, accompanied by groaning sounds.
Objective: Previous studies have reported that the noise generated by dental equipment can interfere with the auscultation of respiratory sounds during sedation. Therefore, this study aimed to identify whether positing the acoustic sensor on the chest or cervical position would be least susceptible to interference from dental suction device noise, a prominent noise noted during respiratory sound monitoring during dental sedation.
Methods: This prospective cohort study was conducted with 30 students.
Background: Lung auscultation using a smartphone built-in microphone is promising for home monitoring of pediatric respiratory diseases. Our aim was to compare respiratory sounds recorded by a smartphone and a digital stethoscope by assessing the proportion of quality recordings and adventitious sounds detected by each device.
Methods: A comparative early feasibility study with children from a public school in Northern Portugal was conducted.
This report details a case of acute idiopathic velopharyngeal insufficiency in a previously healthy eight-year-old girl, presenting with sudden voice alteration and nasal regurgitation following mild respiratory symptoms. Physical examination identified unilateral velar paralysis with open rhinolalia, without additional neurological deficits. Extensive diagnostic evaluation, including nasopharyngoscopy, cerebral and cervical imaging, and infectious serologies, yielded unremarkable findings.
Objectives: To estimate the prevalence of allergic rhinitis (AR), atopic dermatitis (AD), and wheezing, and to describe their patterns of co-occurrence according to different characteristics in adolescence and early adulthood.
Methods: Cross-sectional analyses from the 15-year and 22-year follow-ups of the 1993 Pelotas (Brazil) Birth Cohort. The outcomes were assessed based on self-reported data, and the patterns of co-occurrence were determined using cluster analysis.
