Empirical mode decomposition and grey level difference for lung sound classification

Abstract

Lung sound is one of the parameters of respiratory health. This sound has a specific character if there is a disease in the lungs. In some cases, it is difficult to distinguish one type of lung sound to another. It takes the expertise, experience and sensitivity of clinicians to avoid misdiagnosis. Therefore, many studies have proposed a feature extraction method combined with automatic classification method for the detection of lung disease through lung sound analysis. Since the complex nature of biological signals which are produced by complex processes, the multiscale method is an interesting feature extraction method to be developed. This study proposes an empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and a modified gray level difference (GLD) for a lung sound classification. The EMD was used to decompose the signal, and then GLD was measured on each decomposed signal as a feature set. There are five classes of lung sounds which were simulated in this study, including normal, wheeze, crackle, pleural rub, and stridor. Performance evaluation was carried out using a multilayer perceptron (MLP) and 3-fold cross-validation. This proposed method yielded the highest accuracy of 96.97%. This study outperformed several previous studies which were simulated on the same dataset. It is hoped that in the future, the proposed methods can be tested on larger datasets to determine the robustness of the methods.