Pediatric Asthma Detection with Googles HeAR Model: An AI-Driven Respiratory Sound Classifier

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Ehtesham, Abul, Kumar, Saket, Singh, Aditi, Khoei, Tala Talaei
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Ehtesham, Abul
Kumar, Saket
Singh, Aditi
Khoei, Tala Talaei
author_facet Ehtesham, Abul
Kumar, Saket
Singh, Aditi
Khoei, Tala Talaei
contents Early detection of asthma in children is crucial to prevent long-term respiratory complications and reduce emergency interventions. This work presents an AI-powered diagnostic pipeline that leverages Googles Health Acoustic Representations (HeAR) model to detect early signs of asthma from pediatric respiratory sounds. The SPRSound dataset, the first open-access collection of annotated respiratory sounds in children aged 1 month to 18 years, is used to extract 2-second audio segments labeled as wheeze, crackle, rhonchi, stridor, or normal. Each segment is embedded into a 512-dimensional representation using HeAR, a foundation model pretrained on 300 million health-related audio clips, including 100 million cough sounds. Multiple classifiers, including SVM, Random Forest, and MLP, are trained on these embeddings to distinguish between asthma-indicative and normal sounds. The system achieves over 91\% accuracy, with strong performance on precision-recall metrics for positive cases. In addition to classification, learned embeddings are visualized using PCA, misclassifications are analyzed through waveform playback, and ROC and confusion matrix insights are provided. This method demonstrates that short, low-resource pediatric recordings, when powered by foundation audio models, can enable fast, noninvasive asthma screening. The approach is especially promising for digital diagnostics in remote or underserved healthcare settings.
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publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle Pediatric Asthma Detection with Googles HeAR Model: An AI-Driven Respiratory Sound Classifier
Ehtesham, Abul
Kumar, Saket
Singh, Aditi
Khoei, Tala Talaei
Sound
Artificial Intelligence
Early detection of asthma in children is crucial to prevent long-term respiratory complications and reduce emergency interventions. This work presents an AI-powered diagnostic pipeline that leverages Googles Health Acoustic Representations (HeAR) model to detect early signs of asthma from pediatric respiratory sounds. The SPRSound dataset, the first open-access collection of annotated respiratory sounds in children aged 1 month to 18 years, is used to extract 2-second audio segments labeled as wheeze, crackle, rhonchi, stridor, or normal. Each segment is embedded into a 512-dimensional representation using HeAR, a foundation model pretrained on 300 million health-related audio clips, including 100 million cough sounds. Multiple classifiers, including SVM, Random Forest, and MLP, are trained on these embeddings to distinguish between asthma-indicative and normal sounds. The system achieves over 91\% accuracy, with strong performance on precision-recall metrics for positive cases. In addition to classification, learned embeddings are visualized using PCA, misclassifications are analyzed through waveform playback, and ROC and confusion matrix insights are provided. This method demonstrates that short, low-resource pediatric recordings, when powered by foundation audio models, can enable fast, noninvasive asthma screening. The approach is especially promising for digital diagnostics in remote or underserved healthcare settings.
title Pediatric Asthma Detection with Googles HeAR Model: An AI-Driven Respiratory Sound Classifier
topic Sound
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.20124