Transformer-Based Network for Accurate Classification of Lung Auscultation Sounds

Respiratory diseases are a major cause of death worldwide, affecting a significant proportion of the pop-ulation with lung function abnormalities that can lead to respiratory illnesses. Early detection and prevention are critical to effective management of these disorders. Deep learning algorithms offer a promising approach for analyzing complex medical data and aiding in early disease detection. While transformer-based models for sequence classification have proven effective for tasks like sentiment analysis, topic classification, etc., their potential for respiratory disease classification remains largely unexplored. This paper proposes a classifier utilizing the transformer-encoder block, which can capture complex patterns and dependencies in medical data. The proposed model is trained and evaluated on a large dataset from the International Conference on Biomedical Health Informatics 2017, achieving state-of-the-art results with a mean sensitivity of 70.53%, mean specificity of 84.10%, mean average score of 77.32%, and mean harmonic score of 76.10%. These results demonstrate the model’s effectiveness in diagnosing respiratory diseases while taking up minimal computational resources. © 2023 by Begell House, Inc.