Exploring Finetuned Audio-LLM on Heart Murmur Features

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Florea, Adrian, Jiang, Xilin, Mesgarani, Nima, Jiang, Xiaofan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Florea, Adrian
Jiang, Xilin
Mesgarani, Nima
Jiang, Xiaofan
author_facet Florea, Adrian
Jiang, Xilin
Mesgarani, Nima
Jiang, Xiaofan
contents Large language models (LLMs) for audio have excelled in recognizing and analyzing human speech, music, and environmental sounds. However, their potential for understanding other types of sounds, particularly biomedical sounds, remains largely underexplored despite significant scientific interest. In this study, we focus on diagnosing cardiovascular diseases using phonocardiograms, i.e., heart sounds. Most existing deep neural network (DNN) paradigms are restricted to heart murmur classification (healthy vs unhealthy) and do not predict other acoustic features of the murmur such as timing, grading, harshness, pitch, and quality, which are important in helping physicians diagnose the underlying heart conditions. We propose to finetune an audio LLM, Qwen2-Audio, on the PhysioNet CirCor DigiScope phonocardiogram (PCG) dataset and evaluate its performance in classifying 11 expert-labeled murmur features. Additionally, we aim to achieve more noise-robust and generalizable system by exploring a preprocessing segmentation algorithm using an audio representation model, SSAMBA. Our results indicate that the LLM-based model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in 8 of the 11 features and performs comparably in the remaining 3. Moreover, the LLM successfully classifies long-tail murmur features with limited training data, a task that all previous methods have failed to classify. These findings underscore the potential of audio LLMs as assistants to human cardiologists in enhancing heart disease diagnosis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_13884
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring Finetuned Audio-LLM on Heart Murmur Features
Florea, Adrian
Jiang, Xilin
Mesgarani, Nima
Jiang, Xiaofan
Audio and Speech Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Sound
Large language models (LLMs) for audio have excelled in recognizing and analyzing human speech, music, and environmental sounds. However, their potential for understanding other types of sounds, particularly biomedical sounds, remains largely underexplored despite significant scientific interest. In this study, we focus on diagnosing cardiovascular diseases using phonocardiograms, i.e., heart sounds. Most existing deep neural network (DNN) paradigms are restricted to heart murmur classification (healthy vs unhealthy) and do not predict other acoustic features of the murmur such as timing, grading, harshness, pitch, and quality, which are important in helping physicians diagnose the underlying heart conditions. We propose to finetune an audio LLM, Qwen2-Audio, on the PhysioNet CirCor DigiScope phonocardiogram (PCG) dataset and evaluate its performance in classifying 11 expert-labeled murmur features. Additionally, we aim to achieve more noise-robust and generalizable system by exploring a preprocessing segmentation algorithm using an audio representation model, SSAMBA. Our results indicate that the LLM-based model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in 8 of the 11 features and performs comparably in the remaining 3. Moreover, the LLM successfully classifies long-tail murmur features with limited training data, a task that all previous methods have failed to classify. These findings underscore the potential of audio LLMs as assistants to human cardiologists in enhancing heart disease diagnosis.
title Exploring Finetuned Audio-LLM on Heart Murmur Features
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Artificial Intelligence
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.13884