Harshith.
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Run 07Design of Advanced Systems · Johns Hopkins · Fall 2024

COPD Diagnosis from Lung Sounds

ML + DSP pipeline · ICBHI

accuracy
95% clean
source
smartphone

Python · scikit-learn · librosa · ICBHI

Problem

COPD diagnosis still leans on clinic visits. Smartphone-recorded lung sounds are cheap and accessible, and also noisy, poorly coupled, and easy to overfit if you only ever train on clean corpus audio.

Approach

An at-home diagnostic pipeline on the ICBHI 2017 respiratory sound database: filtering, feature extraction, normalization, then classical classifiers.

  • Compared logistic regression, SVM, and random forest on extracted acoustic features.
  • 95% classification accuracy on clean data.
  • Deployment plan included recording guidelines, noise cancellation, and the regulatory constraints that come with calling something a medical diagnostic tool.

This is the project that taught me the gap between a clean-dataset accuracy number and something you would let a patient use at home. The next systems I built started from that gap rather than from the model.