Abstract
Background
Cough is an important respiratory symptom being of great interest to many researchers. Up to now, most knowledge about cough has been collected through standardized questionnaires. Objective, and reliable detection of cough assessed by automated lung sound monitoring are becoming increasingly important. The aim of this study is to validate the LEOSound lung sound monitor by using previously determined and investigated COPD datasets (1,2).
Methods
Based on multiple recordings of 48 patients with stable COPD II-IV, we validated the cough detection algorithm of LEOSound by using a contingency table. Sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values were used as quantitative measures.
Results
We found the overall accuracy to be 87.3% with sensitivity and specificity of 98.7% and 80.2%, respectively. Major reasons for midsections in descending order were throat cleaning, snoring and movement artifacts.
Conclusion
In comparison to other full-automated cough monitoring systems, the LEOSound performs the best in sensitivity, but shows slightly poor specificity. Misdetections were mainly caused due to morphological similar noises and can be withdrawn while scanning through the recording manually.
Computerized lung sound monitoring to assess effectiveness of physiotherapy and secretion removal: a feasibility study