  A reliable, remote, and continuous real-time respiratory sound monitor with
automated respiratory sound analysis ability is urgently required in many
clinical scenarios-such as in monitoring disease progression of coronavirus
disease 2019-to replace conventional auscultation with a handheld stethoscope.
However, a robust computerized respiratory sound analysis algorithm has not yet
been validated in practical applications. In this study, we developed a lung
sound database (HF_Lung_V1) comprising 9,765 audio files of lung sounds
(duration of 15 s each), 34,095 inhalation labels, 18,349 exhalation labels,
13,883 continuous adventitious sound (CAS) labels (comprising 8,457 wheeze
labels, 686 stridor labels, and 4,740 rhonchi labels), and 15,606 discontinuous
adventitious sound labels (all crackles). We conducted benchmark tests for long
short-term memory (LSTM), gated recurrent unit (GRU), bidirectional LSTM
(BiLSTM), bidirectional GRU (BiGRU), convolutional neural network (CNN)-LSTM,
CNN-GRU, CNN-BiLSTM, and CNN-BiGRU models for breath phase detection and
adventitious sound detection. We also conducted a performance comparison
between the LSTM-based and GRU-based models, between unidirectional and
bidirectional models, and between models with and without a CNN. The results
revealed that these models exhibited adequate performance in lung sound
analysis. The GRU-based models outperformed, in terms of F1 scores and areas
under the receiver operating characteristic curves, the LSTM-based models in
most of the defined tasks. Furthermore, all bidirectional models outperformed
their unidirectional counterparts. Finally, the addition of a CNN improved the
accuracy of lung sound analysis, especially in the CAS detection tasks.
