Interactive Lungs Auscultation with Reinforcement Learning Agent

Lung sounds auscultation is the first and most common examination carried out by every general practitioner or family doctor. It is fast, easy and well known procedure, popularized by La ennec (Hy-acinthe, 1819), who invented the stethoscope. Nowadays, different variants of such tool can be found on the market, both analog and electronic, but regardless of the type of stethoscope, this process still is highly subjective. Indeed, an auscultation normally involves the usage of a stethoscope by a physician, thus relying on the examiner's own hearing, experience and ability to interpret psychoacoustical features. Another strong limitation of standard auscultation can be found in the stethoscope itself, since its frequency response tends to attenuate frequency components of the lung sound signal above nearly 120 Hz, leaving lower frequency bands to be analyzed and to which the human ear is not really sensitive (Sovijrvi et al., 2000) (Sarkar et al., 2015).