Lung sound signals convey valuable information of the lung status. Auscultation is an effective technique to appreciate the condition of the respiratory system using lung sound signals. The prior works on asthma detection from lung sound signals rely on the presence of wheeze. In this paper, we have classified normal and asthmatic subjects using advanced signal processing of posterior lung sound signals, even in the absence of wheeze.

We collected lung sounds of 60 subjects (30 normal and 30 asthma) using a novel 4-channel data acquisition system from four different positions over the posterior chest, as suggested by the pulmonologist. A spectral subband based feature extraction scheme is proposed that works with artificial neural network (ANN) and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers for the multichannel signal. The power spectral density (PSD) is estimated from extracted lung sound cycle using Welch’s method, which then decomposed into uniform subbands. A set of statistical features is computed from each subband and applied to ANN and SVM classifiers to classify normal and asthmatic subjects.

In the first part of this study, the performances of each individual channel and four channels together are evaluated where the combined channel performance is found superior to that of individual channels. Next, the performances of all possible combinations of the channels are investigated and the best classification accuracies of 89.2( ± 3.87)% and 93.3( ± 3.10)% are achieved for 2-channel and 3-channel combinations in ANN and SVM classifiers, respectively.

The proposed multichannel asthma detection method where the presence of wheeze in lung sound is not a necessary requirement, outperforms commonly used lung sound classification methods in this field and provides significant relative improvement. The channel combination study gives insight into the contribution of respective lung sound collection areas and their combinations in asthma detection.