Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a serious and debilitating disease affecting millions around the world. Its early detection using non-invasive means could enable preventive interventions that improve quality of life and patient outcomes, with speech recently shown to be a valuable biomarker. Yet, its validity across different linguistic groups remains to be seen. To that end, audio data were collected from 96 Danish participants conducting three speech tasks (reading, coughing, sustained vowels). Half of the participants were diagnosed with different levels of COPD and the other half formed a healthy control group. Subsequently, we investigated different baseline models using openSMILE features and learnt x-vector embeddings. We obtained a best accuracy of 67% using openSMILE features and logistic regression. Our findings support the potential of speech-based analysis as a non-invasive, remote, and scalable screening tool as part of future COPD healthcare solutions.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a major global health concern, with accurate severity assessment crucial for effective management, especially in intensive care units (ICUs). This study presents a novel approach to COPD sever - ity classification using machine learning algorithms applied to the MIMIC - III dataset. Our work presents a new application of the MIMIC - III dataset and con - tributes to the growing field of artificial intelligence in critical care medicine. We developed a model to classify COPD severity based on available ICU parameters, including blood gas measurements and vital signs. Our methodology incorpo - rated semi - supervised learning techniques to leverage unlabeled data, enhancing model robustness. A random forest classifier demonstrated superior performance, achieving 92.51% accuracy and 0.98 ROC AUC distinguishing between mild - to - moderate and severe COPD cases. This approach offers a practical, accurate, and accessible tool for rapid COPD severity assessment in ICU settings, poten - tially improving clinical decision - making and patient outcomes. Future research should focus on external validation and integration into clinical decision support systems to enhance COPD management in the ICUs.

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder (COPD) is an irreversible and progressive disease which is highly heritable. Clinically, COPD is defined using the summary measures derived from a spirometry test but these are not always adequate. Here we show that using the high-dimensional raw spirogram can provide a richer signal compared to just using the summary measures. We design a transformer-based deep learning technique to process the raw spirogram values along with demographic information and predict clinically-relevant endpoints related to COPD. Our method is able to perform better than prior works while being more computationally efficient. Using the weights learned by the model, we make the framework more interpretable by identifying parts of the spirogram that are important for the model predictions. Pairing up with a board-certified pulmonologist, we also provide clinical insights into the different aspects of the spirogram and show that the explanations obtained from the model align with underlying medical knowledge.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a serious inflammatory lung disease affecting millions of people around the world. Due to an obstructed airflow from the lungs, it also becomes manifest in patients' vocal behaviour. Of particular importance is the detection of an exacerbation episode, which marks an acute phase and often requires hospitalisation and treatment. Previous work has shown that it is possible to distinguish between a pre- and a post-treatment state using automatic analysis of read speech. In this contribution, we examine whether sustained vowels can provide a complementary lens for telling apart these two states. Using a cohort of 50 patients, we show that the inclusion of sustained vowels can improve performance to up to 79\% unweighted average recall, from a 71\% baseline using read speech. We further identify and interpret the most important acoustic features that characterise the manifestation of COPD in sustained vowels.

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is a chronic inflammatory lung condition that causes airflow obstruction. The existing methods can only detect patients who already have COPD based on obvious features shown in the spirogram (In this article, the spirogram specifically involves measuring Volume-Flow curve time series). Early prediction of COPD risk is vital for monitoring COPD disease progression, slowing it down, or even preventing its onset. However, these methods fail to early predict an individual's probability of COPD in the future based on subtle features in the spirogram. To address this gap, for the first time, we propose DeepSpiro, a method based on deep learning for early prediction of future COPD risk. DeepSpiro consists of four parts. First, we construct Volume-Flow curves guided by Time-Volume instability smoothing (SpiroSmoother) to enhance the stability of the original Volume-Flow curves precisely. Second, we extract critical features from the evolution of varied-length key patches (SpiroEncoder) to capture the key temporal evolution from original high-dimensional dynamic sequences to a unified low-dimensional temporal representation. Third, we explain the model based on temporal attention and heterogeneous feature fusion (SpiroExplainer), which integrates information from heterogeneous data such as spirogram and demographic information. Fourth, we predict the risk of COPD based on the evolution of key patch concavity (SpiroPredictor), enabling accurate prediction of the risk of disease in high-risk patients who are not yet diagnosed, for up to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years, and beyond. We conduct experiments on the UK Biobank dataset. Results show that DeepSpiro achieves an AUC value of 0.8328 in the task of detecting COPD. In early prediction tasks, high-risk and low-risk groups show significant differences in the future, with a p-value of <0.001.

In recent years, advancements in deep learning techniques have considerably enhanced the efficiency and accuracy of medical diagnostics. In this work, a novel approach using multi-task learning (MTL) for the simultaneous classification of lung sounds and lung diseases is proposed. Our proposed model leverages MTL with four different deep learning models such as 2D CNN, ResNet50, MobileNet and Densenet to extract relevant features from the lung sound recordings. The ICBHI 2017 Respiratory Sound Database was employed in the current study. The MTL for MobileNet model performed better than the other models considered, with an accuracy of74\% for lung sound analysis and 91\% for lung diseases classification. Results of the experimentation demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in classifying both lung sounds and lung diseases concurrently. In this study,using the demographic data of the patients from the database, risk level computation for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease is also carried out. For this computation, three machine learning algorithms namely Logistic Regression, SVM and Random Forest classifierswere employed. Among these ML algorithms, the Random Forest classifier had the highest accuracy of 92\%.This work helps in considerably reducing the physician's burden of not just diagnosing the pathology but also effectively communicating to the patient about the possible causes or outcomes.

We aim to optimize the binary detection of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) based on emphysema presence in the lung with convolutional neural networks (CNN) by exploring manually adjusted versus automated window-setting optimization (WSO) on computed tomography (CT) images. 7,194 CT images (3,597 with COPD; 3,597 healthy controls) from 78 subjects (43 with COPD; 35 healthy controls) were selected retrospectively (10.2018-12.2019) and preprocessed. For each image, intensity values were manually clipped to the emphysema window setting and a baseline 'full-range' window setting. Class-balanced train, validation, and test sets contained 3,392, 1,114, and 2,688 images. The network backbone was optimized by comparing various CNN architectures. Furthermore, automated WSO was implemented by adding a customized layer to the model. The image-level area under the Receiver Operating Characteristics curve (AUC) [lower, upper limit 95% confidence] was utilized to compare model variations. Repeated inference (n=7) on the test set showed that the DenseNet was the most efficient backbone and achieved a mean AUC of 0.80 [0.76, 0.85] without WSO. Comparably, with input images manually adjusted to the emphysema window, the DenseNet model predicted COPD with a mean AUC of 0.86 [0.82, 0.89]. By adding a customized WSO layer to the DenseNet, an optimal window in the proximity of the emphysema window setting was learned automatically, and a mean AUC of 0.82 [0.78, 0.86] was achieved. Detection of COPD with DenseNet models was improved by WSO of CT data to the emphysema window setting range.

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) is an irreversible airway obstruction with a high societal burden. Although smoking is known to be the biggest risk factor, additional components need to be considered. In this study, we aim to identify COPD risk factors by applying machine learning models that integrate sociodemographic, clinical, and genetic data to predict COPD development.

Accurate airway extraction from computed tomography (CT) images is a critical step for planning navigation bronchoscopy and quantitative assessment of airway-related chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The existing methods are challenging to sufficiently segment the airway, especially the high-generation airway, with the constraint of the limited label and cannot meet the clinical use in COPD. We propose a novel two-stage 3D contextual transformer-based U-Net for airway segmentation using CT images. The method consists of two stages, performing initial and refined airway segmentation. The two-stage model shares the same subnetwork with different airway masks as input. Contextual transformer block is performed both in the encoder and decoder path of the subnetwork to finish high-quality airway segmentation effectively. In the first stage, the total airway mask and CT images are provided to the subnetwork, and the intrapulmonary airway mask and corresponding CT scans to the subnetwork in the second stage. Then the predictions of the two-stage method are merged as the final prediction. Extensive experiments were performed on in-house and multiple public datasets. Quantitative and qualitative analysis demonstrate that our proposed method extracted much more branches and lengths of the tree while accomplishing state-of-the-art airway segmentation performance. The code is available at https://github.com/zhaozsq/airway_segmentation.

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is one of the most common chronic illnesses in the world and the third leading cause of mortality worldwide. It is often underdiagnosed or not diagnosed until later in the disease course. Spirometry tests are the gold standard for diagnosing COPD but can be difficult to obtain, especially in resource-poor countries. Chest X-rays (CXRs), however, are readily available and may serve as a screening tool to identify patients with COPD who should undergo further testing. Currently, no research applies deep learning (DL) algorithms that use large multi-site and multi-modal data to detect COPD patients and evaluate fairness across demographic groups. We use three CXR datasets in our study, CheXpert to pre-train models, MIMIC-CXR to develop, and Emory-CXR to validate our models. The CXRs from patients in the early stage of COPD and not on mechanical ventilation are selected for model training and validation. We visualize the Grad-CAM heatmaps of the true positive cases on the base model for both MIMIC-CXR and Emory-CXR test datasets. We further propose two fusion schemes, (1) model-level fusion, including bagging and stacking methods using MIMIC-CXR, and (2) data-level fusion, including multi-site data using MIMIC-CXR and Emory-CXR, and multi-modal using MIMIC-CXRs and MIMIC-IV EHR, to improve the overall model performance. Fairness analysis is performed to evaluate if the fusion schemes have a discrepancy in the performance among different demographic groups. The results demonstrate that DL models can detect COPD using CXRs, which can facilitate early screening, especially in low-resource regions where CXRs are more accessible than spirometry. The multi-site data fusion scheme could improve the model generalizability on the Emory-CXR test data. Further studies on using CXR or other modalities to predict COPD ought to be in future work.